Rime to Read is a very cool program for beginning readers that I learned about recently (www.rimetoread.com). Rime is not one of those annoyingly deliberate misspellings (does that bother anyone else as much as it does me? Is it so hard to spell out Q-U-I-C-K instead of K-W-I-K?? I'm trying to teach my kids to spell here people!) - It is actually a word all its own that means, essentially, a word family, or words that both look and sound alike (cat, pat, sat, that, hat, mat…); whereas rhymes (care, hair, where) sound alike but don’t always look alike. I never knew that!
So, I recommend you check out this neat system if you are or soon will be teaching your little one(s) to read. It’s an entirely virtual, online program, which is nice because you don’t have to try and find the books under someone’s bed or couch cushions when it’s time to have a lesson, and no shipping costs or waiting for a package to arrive – you can dive right in! You can print out the books for home use or just have your child read them on screen (sometimes this is way more fun!). It’s a 20 book collection (sold in 5 sets of 4 books each at $9.99 per set or $44.99 for all 20 books together). They’ve even added a bonus “click to hear” feature which lets you and your child hear the word read aloud on the computer. My two up and coming readers will find this incredibly cool!!
And you can rest assured that you are using quality products as they are developed and produced by three genuine experts in this field, a PhD Learning Specialist, a Reading Teacher (M.S.) and an illustrator. I wanted to include their own description of this system:
There are
very few products that actually teach reading. Instead, there are many
leveled readers, which provide reading practice rather than instruction.
With Rime to Read, every single word is taught. Not only are children successful as readers
of Rime to Read, they love reading the books.
The following qualities make this product so unique and effective:
- Tightly
structured to insure success for first time readers, as well as older students
needing remedial work
- Uses color
to support discrimination and reading of individual word patterns, or families
- The use of illustrations develops rather than
simply reflects the story line, resulting in delightful, humorous stories which
are very appealing in spite of their controlled vocabulary.
Sight words are introduced very gradually, hence the “tightly structured” terminology, which is very helpful if you are working with a struggling learner. Also, I really like the fact that the pictures don’t just totally give away what the words on the page are (i.e. act as a crutch for the child who is not able to read or decode the words themselves and uses the pictures to guess) but instead assists the reader in actually, you know, READING them as the story line plays out! You and your budding book bug should take a look!
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