Finished 1st grade Phonics!!

Courtney was pretty excited yesterday in school! We finished her 1st grade phonics curriculum!

http://www.milestonebooks.com/item/1-111--/?list=Rod_and_Staff_Grade_1

This phonic program was VERY basic, taught the rules very well, concentrated on a rule a day, and gave her plenty of practice. I think she reads as well as she does because of this program. (Plus it is super-cheap!! There are no colors in the book and it is a lot of drilling, but it gets the point across!)

This is also the same program we started at the beginning of last year (her kindergarten year) and it has taken almost a 1 1/2 to get through. There were 150 lessons and we did about four a week.

Her favorite part was the timed reading at the end of each lesson.  Every day, she would get a new set of about 30 words using the new concept she learned that day and then the next day, we would need to see how many she could read in 30 seconds. It was a great challenge! This last week, the words were so easy that she got all of them in one day! (I mean, really easy because they were reviewing long vowels!) But still, she got them all and she was jumping up and down!

We finished her final workbook yesterday and now we are going to start the 2nd grade curriculum.

http://www.milestonebooks.com/item/1-112--/?list=Rod_and_Staff_Grade_2

This picture shows the phonics and reading program, but we are only doing the phonics portion of it. She's super excited to get started beginning the lessons at the beginning are SUPER easy. Technically, we are supposed to be using this at the beginning of a school year when kids have forgotten everything over the summer! That is not how it has worked out for us, so we're just going to start in the middle of the year and have some super-easy review lessons for awhile.

This program will probably take us another 1 1/2 years to get through.  Courtney asked what we do after that and I said, "You are done with phonics after this 2nd grade program. Phonics helps you to spell and read, and hopefully by then, you will have the phonics rules down and can apply them in your reading and writing.  In 3rd grade, we will start English like Megan does, which is out of a textbook." You know what, she was ok with it! She was actually excited!

When I picked out this phonics program about two years ago, I knew it would be a good program. I looked at many others, but I always kept coming back to this one. I was determined to teach Courtney phonics! (Megan learned whole-language in school and it is a challenge sometimes getting her to sound out words because she just doesn't know how!). I didn't know how Courtney would respond to this program. Like I said earlier, it's very black and white with a few pictures and she always seemed to be the kid who needed hands-on activities. I think she has taken to the program and enjoys it.

(If you are curious, the company who makes Rod and Staff Curriculum is a Mennonite community, so there are many "ye" and "thee", and "Brother John" in these books, but it's fun.  They also don't have any kindergarten curriculum, so that's why I started her in the 1st grade book last year.  We are also doing Rod and Staff Math this year and she is in the 2nd grade book. So she's not technically ahead a grade level, but right where she should be in my opinion. I am pretty sure she is learning the exact same concepts as her public school counterparts! )