So I bought the book “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” last year for my 5 year old, Ekid. I had read the rave reviews on Amazon.com and decided to buy it. I never used a book like this for Nboy, but he was always more interested in practicing reading and writing than Ekid is and so I didn’t feel I needed a “curriculum” to teach him. Ekid on the other hand needs more to keep him interested.

So this book has 100 lessons and claims that your child will be able to read and write by the end of it. Each lesson goes over sounds and writing those sounds at the end of the lesson. One of the first sounds is the short “A” sound as in “cat”. You put your finger on the first ball and slide it on the arrow to the ball under the letter and you have your child say the sound slowly, drawing it out as in “aaaaaa” as you slide your finger to the end of the arrow. They learn to say the sound slowly at first and then you have them “say it fast”.

Each lesson progresses and a new sound is added every couple lessons. There is a lot of repetition in order for your child to remember each sound from lesson to lesson.

Eventually they start putting letters together to form words, and then this progresses to putting the words together in short sentences with a picture for reading comprehension.

Now for my review:

I LOVE this book! Ekid is doing so well with it, and he really enjoys it. He has very little trouble remembering the sounds he learned in the previous lesson when we get to the next lesson because there is so much repetition in learning each sound. We would have been completely through the book by now, but we only did a few lessons last year and then stopped because at the time he just wasn’t quite as interested. But now we are on lesson 16 and he is able to read the short sentence that has been in the last couple lessons by sounding it out. I really think Siegfried Engelmann did an excellent job with this book.

Even if you are not homeschooling, “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” is still a wonderful book to get to give your child a head start in reading and writing before entering school, and it gives parent and child a nice chance to spend some time together learning.