The Reading Lesson: Teach Your Child to Read in 20 Easy Lessons (1) (The Reading Lesson series) Paperback – April 1, 2002

The media could not be loaded. We bought this right before my son turned 4, and we are now about halfway through the book. I can’t say enough good things about it. The lessons are straightforward, short enough to keep his attention, and build skills in a way that really makes sense. He is already reading so well, and it’s amazing to watch his confidence grow each week.As a parent, I appreciate how easy it is to follow no prep, just open the book and go. My son looks forward to the lessons, which is a huge win at this age. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a gentle but effective way to teach their child to read. It has been a wonderful experience for us, and I’m glad we started early.

I started this book with my son when he was 3 years 2 months old. After just a month with this book, he is able to sound out and read words and simple stories, and we are only on Lesson 6. So, I am now pretty convinced that young children CAN learn to read as long as they are given the right instruction (this book!). As a special educator who has seen tons of reading programs, costing from hundreds to thousands of dollars, I feel that none of them compare to this $18 book.UPDATE (4/15/16): We have now finished all 20 lessons last week, and I am blown away by how much progress he has made. It took us 4 months to finish, and last night he read me Dr. Seuss' "A Fish Out of Water", which is 68 pages long! Here is what I have learned:It is a great curriculum but it IS hard work for both parent and child. Please do not assume that it will be a breeze.1. Make sure your child knows letters/sounds, can rhyme, and has a 10 min attention span before you start this book. Otherwise, work on those first.2. Set a time every day and commit to it 100%. I even took it on vacation with us and he almost never had a day off. K quickly accepted reading lessons as his new routine.3. The authors recommend 1 page a day for under age 5, but with 400 pages, I realized that this would take me over a year!! (And I don't have patience for that) Because of my work schedule and not getting home till 5pm every day, I eventually settled on 2 pages a day on weekdays, and 2 pages twice a day on weekends and holidays. This enabled us to finish in four months. It usually took us less than 10 minutes to do 2 pages.4. In retrospect, this pace was rather fast and resulted in him not learning some sounds (especially vowel combinations) as well as he should because we rushed through them.5. I sometimes took videos of him reading and he absolutely loved to watch himself read. He was so proud of himself, and it was a great confidence booster. Plus I could show it off to friends and family, who told him how good his reading was, another confidence booster.6. The journey was not always easy or smooth sailing, so mentally prepare yourself for frustration and even tears. K hit his first roadblock around Lesson 4, and he kept saying "I can't do it, it's too hard!" As the authors say, this is perfectly normal and do NOT quit. Persevere!!!7. Nothing wrong with using a little bribery to get through the difficult pages. For K it was usually in the form of: after you finish you can have a Popsicle, play on the iPad, go to the park, etc.8. As we neared the end (around Lesson 15) I started telling him he was going to be an awesome reader and would be able to read books by the time we finished the reading lessons. The power of suggestion worked, and sure enough he really did start picking up books and reading them!!9. Even after we finished all 20 lessons, I continued to have him read aloud at least one book to me every day. There have been some occasions (increasingly more) that I find him in his room reading to himself! These moments have been AMAZING, and made all the time and effort I put in all worthwhile.10. It has been such an amazing, rewarding journey and I am SO glad I decided to teach him to read myself! He has learned not only to read, but to persevere through challenging tasks.Good luck!

The Reading Lesson is the single best program for teaching children to read I have found to date and I have seen many. I first came accross it while trying to find materials to help my daughter learn to read. My daughter is extremely smart. She is also dyslexic and the way reading is taught in early elementary just did not work for her. As a teacher, I have learned about different ways of teaching, learning and ways to differentiate instruction and I could not understand why no one knew how to work with a child whose brain processed information differently as is the case with people who have dyslexia. I spoke with several colleagues who are SPED teachers and specialists in our school district and was informed that there was no training given to them in how to work with children who had specific reading disabilities such as dyslexia. I decided to find a way. After looking and trying a wide variety of programs, I found the Reading Lesson.It worked. Not only was it simple enough for anyone to use, but the program is built on solid phonics and whole language principles give the best results in the shortest amount of time. The pages are simple and have plenty of white space. This helps simplify reading for children who are unable to see spaces between words and who see letters out of order or inverted. They use phonetic markings but not excessively, and slowly wean the children off of them as the book progresses. Sounds are introduced slowly and in a way that not only makes sense but allows them to begin reading simple sentences from the first lesson. This provides the children with a feeling of success that you simply cannot get any other way. The program also includes a large number of Dolche sight words. The mixture of phonics and whole language is key to achieving fluency and comprehension. It also allows children to move at their own pace, which is extremely important.Years after teaching my daughter to read, I came accross a student who somehow reached third grade without learning how to read despite having had to repeat grades before. The student's self esteem had been severely affected to the point where there was serious danger of psychological damage due to depression. Although I was not the child's reading teacher at the time, I decided to give the program a try. I was not sure which concepts the child had managed to learn through the years and what was missing, so we started the book from lesson one. We worked every day before school for 30 to 45 minutes using the Reading Lesson as our primer and supplementing with other reading material to practice reading from books, as well as the free materials found on the Starfall website. While I was working with the student to re-build the foundation of phonics and sight words found in the Reading Lesson, the reading teacher worked on third grade skills regarding reading analysis using texts appropriate for the student's reading level. In a month the student had made significant progress and had gone from not knowing letters and sounds (pre primer) to beginning to read first grade level texts. The change was also apparent in that the student was participating in class, talking to classmates more and seemed much happier on a daily basis. The student also went from writing complete gibberish when asked to answer questions on paper, to beginning to write actual words with invented spelling based on the phonics the student was learning in the program. The change in the short amount of time was simply amazing. The student continued to progress. While it took time for the student to progress, the foundation provided by the Reading Lesson was key in essentially rescuing a child who had fallen through the cracks and was headed for a very bad future.The Reading Lesson is effective, simple to use, and cost effective. You do not need to be a teacher to use this nor have any specialized knowledge in reading instruction. All you really need is this book to teach your child to read, although the company offers companion programs which are also good (their website has a lot of useful resources). There are also plenty of other resources out there that can be used to complement the Reading Lesson in order to maximize and enrich the learning experience. If you want to help get your child started in reading, or if you have a child who is struggling with reading (particularly decoding words), you may want to give this book a try. It really does work.