The Critical Thinking Co. Review

Vendor: The Critical Thinking Co.
Product: Fun-Time Phonics!
Age: Pre-K to 2nd
Price: $39.99 About: The Critical Thinking Co. presented me with Fun-Time Phonics! to review. The paperback book is three hundred twenty pages long. It also is reproducible with in your class room, or your children at home. They based the program on the scientific findings of the National Reading Commission. The program focuses on vowel sounds instead of memorization. They use 100 activities in order to teach these skills through listening, thinking, speaking and and reading. There is an introduction that tells you how and why the program works. Throughout the book there is also teaching suggestions to help you along. The 100 activities are broken into four sections. The first section is phonemic awareness, which takes up lessons one through fourteen. This helps the child hear the sounds in a word and focuses on vowels. Section two is alphabetic which is activities fifteen through ninety-four. This teaches the vowels as well as the consonants. Section three is beginning to read which is activities ninety-five through one-hundred. These activities go over matching with pictures to reading first words and two word phrases.  The fourth, and last section, is words I can read. This is just a list of simple words to practice reading. 
How we used: I used this with my 7 year old. We have not pushed reading with him because he doesn't do well with memorization. We worked on this Monday through Thursday aiming to complete at least one activity a day. If I knew he got it and he was willing we would try another lesson. Each of the lessons is about 4 pages long. All the pages are fun and colorful to keep attention though. The page gives me the instructions to give and then he would answer the questions. He really enjoyed the fact there was no writing and he could just verbally give me the answers. Sometimes he didn't grasp an activity very well so it was easy to just go back over it without having to erase and start over, or even photocopying the pages before hand.  The words are all CVC words so they will carry onto the next reading program you move into nicely. They are easy words and the activities do a great job leading up to reading them well. I am taking the back pages with the list of words and going to make him a list of his known words so he can get a treat when he learns them all. A nice incentive to completing the book when the time comes. 
We loved that this is an all you need kind of reading program. It is also really good for those that hate the extra work of writing. I really think this would have been a great program to start my dyslexic daughter out with. She got so frustrated with the writing in many other programs that we tried. I think this book would be great for homeschoolers, you save a ton getting to use with multiple kids, or even a public school child that needs some extra help. It would be easy for a mom to give a bit of a lesson after school with out taking up so much time.    
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