Review | The Reading Lesson

I first encountered The Reading Lesson about 4 years ago. Since then I have used it long term with half a dozen kids ages 3-7 and used it as a supplement for several others. I, personally love The Reading Lesson. It is a graduated phonics based reading curriculum that can be completed as quickly as 10 weeks (9 weeks and 6 days is our record).

The complete title is The Reading Lesson: Teach Your Child to Read in 20 Lessons may be a little deceiving if you consider a 'lesson' to be something that is done in just one day. Each of the lessons is about 20-27 pages of large printed lessons. I find that usually the fastest I can get through one lesson is 3 days, though depending on the child, the teacher, the pace and a few other factors a lesson could take 10-14 days.

I love this book for many reasons, first I will talk about some of the positives:
The book teaches each letter and sound as it is needed. Each lesson introduces some letters or letter sounds. For example, in lesson 1 the letters: a, c, s, o and t are introduced along with their sounds. Children drill, practice and use those letters and only those letters to read through the words and short 'stories'. So they may read "cat sat at cot" in the first lesson.

Each lesson introduces new letters and letter sounds (i.e. short and long vowel sounds are introduced separately to reduce confusion. Special markers are used to help children distinguish between sounds and are gradually removed until the children are confidently and competently reading without them.)
The children are given the chance to drill and review the sounds, read new words, review old words, read sentences and phrases that use a mix of new words and old words.

The pages aren't cluttered with pictures, obnoxious colors and chaos that is meant to be "fun" so I find it especially good for children who are easily distracted or just don't like visual clutter. They aren't bland to look at, each page has a picture or two. The short page that contains the basic stories are always illustrated with a picture of a character or a scene.

I love the approach of teaching sounds as needed. What is the point in teaching kids at least the basic 26 sounds of the alphabet when many of them are only going to use a handful of them for the first couple of days? If your kid is going to learn to read "cat" first, then teach them c,a,t and practice blending the sounds to read the words act, cat, and the sound 'tac'

This makes it easy for kids to focus on the reading and reduces frustration from sifting through sounds they know but can't use. I have found the book accessible to children as young as 3yo, though the teaching method that I use with a 3yo who is eager to be a 'big kid' is very different from the method I would use with a 3yo who wants to read which is different still from the method I use with a 6yo that is ready to read and eager to learn how, versus a 7yo who is ready developmentally to read but doesn't want to. I have used this book extensively with half a dozen kids and it has been a success each time. I am currently using it to teach 3 children and all of them are making progress using TRL where other books or programs have failed or just fizzled.

Another great thing about TRL is that it focuses on lower case letters first. This might annoy some people, or even just seem odd, but lets think about this. The vast majority or written language is lower-case so it makes sense that kids should learn to recognize lower case letters first. Only the first letter of each sentence is guaranteed to be capitalized, along with proper nouns such as names and titles. I find this a very helpful strategy and so far this hasn't been a problem at all. I find that it reduces frustrations in some children because they don't have to divert energy to remember that
 A = a =  /a/. At the end of each lesson is a list of upper and lower case letters that you can go over gradually with your child, but I have never used them, I find that flash cards, alphabet books, games and simple worksheets have been a better way to teach which uppercase letters go to the lower case letters

I am using TRL with a boy who successfully completed Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons but is really only at an early to mid first grade reading level.

My biggest gripe about TRL is that in the early lessons, they use poor grammar even where it could be avoided. For example, in lesson 5, which introduces the last of the short vowel sounds and gives the child good practice reading cvc words one story reads:
"bob is on the bus. tim is not. bus is gone.if tim runs, tim can get the bus" Based on everything that the book itself has taught, that exact same story could have been written
"bob is on the bus, tim is not. the bus is gone. if tim runs, tim can get on the bus"
Very minor changes make the story feel a little more grammatically correct, though I concede that really only the 2nd sentence is truly off .

Well before the end of the book, your child will be reading grammatically correct stories with punctuation, capitalization, and all of that so don't let that put you off. After lesson 5, I insist that my students read from other basic readers and simple books every single day. Though sometimes you can begin reading other things after lesson 3 or 4 depending on what you have available, if the child is interested and how you feel about sight words etc...

All in all, I give this book 9.5 out of 10 stars. It is an excellent source and by the end of the program your child will be able to read on a 2nd grade level, the book can be completed by most students in about 2-8 months if used appropriately and reading is practiced everyday. I will update this post later to include photographs