McGuffey's(r) Eclectic Primer, Revised Edition

Rating:
Summary: A great early reader!
Review: I bought this book for my 6 year old who is having some trouble learning to read. I love the book for its simplicity. The first couple of pages show the alphabet letters with the uppercase letters on one page and the lowercase letters on the other. My son has really enjoyed using those two pages to learn letter recognition. Then come the reading pages, and each page gets progressively more difficult as you go along. The black and white illustrations are simple and enjoyable but not distracting. Each page has a short lesson with letters and short words shown at the top of the page and sentences using the letters and words down below. My son has enjoyed trying to find the letters/short words from above in the sentences below. The earlier lessons use simple words such as cat and rat, but the lessons do get more complex as you continue along. I have enjoyed teaching my son some new vocabulary words with this book also as some of the older words are used such as lad instead of boy and nag instead of horse. The book is small and easy for a child to hold. This book is well worth the small investment, and I look forward to moving on to the other McGuffy's Readers as my son progresses.

Rating:
Summary: Why spend so much money for Hooked on Phonics?
Review: Last fall, we borrowed the Hooked on Phonics from a neighbor, and saw limited results with my 5 yr old son. BUT, I thought, some progress is better than none, so I begged my mother to buy Hooked on Phonics for Christmas. She didn't. I thought she was just being cheap by giving him a McGuffey Primer, but I have seen my son FLY through the lessons. He is reading with comprehension and retaining the words better than I ever could have imagined. Hooked on Phonics was just too colorful, included too much media (little books, big books, stickers, CDRoms, videotapes, etc.) and was, I don't know, just so HECTIC feeling. With these readers, we sit together on the couch, my son is able to go at his own pace, and have a real sense of accomplishment in just a 5-10 minute lesson. And he has an interest in reading *outside* of the lessons, also, which he didn't have before. I ENCOURAGE YOU to purchase this reader, as well as the entire set, since when you have one, you'll want them all.

BTW- *My son* asked Grandma for the next McGuffey reader for his birthday. Pretty cool, huh?

Rating:
Summary: Learning to Read the Old-Fashioned Way
Review: Originally Attracted to the McGuffey readers for the novelty of it, I bought the Primer shortly after my first child was born. I read it myself, thought the pedagogy sound--particularly the writers' decision to avoid allowing children to use pictures to "guess" the words--and I came to appreciate the simplicity and clarity of the short lessons. While I use many other beginning reader books to help teach my five-year-old daughter to read, we have been working through the McGuffey Primer and loving it, primarily because the lessons are short enough to keep my daughter's attention and to allow her to feel at the end of each lesson that she has accomplished something.

I particularly appreciate the "Reviews" that come after each set of four or five lessons. No pictures means that the child must entirely depend on her/his memory of the words from previous lessons and on phonetics in order to make her/his way through the review.

One slight drawback would be that for some of the lessons, the story line is not clear enough to catch the child's attention. On some occassions, my daughter reads all the words, but she fails to comprehend the lesson's meaning. This is rare, but more modern readers do a better job of making their stories engaging enough that the child forgets how "hard" it is to read, and instead races through the book to find out what happens.

Nonetheless, I think that parents who are serious about teaching their children to read and who understand the value of supplementing their child's school curriculum, will appreciate the Primer and subsequent titles in the McGuffey series. At the same time, they will expose themselves and their children to a bit of Americana!