Review: All About Reading – Pre-Reading Level
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If you’re looking for an open-and-go, lightly scripted pre-reading curriculum for your homeschooler, All About Reading is the curriculum for you. Through its darling read-aloud books, craft projects, and fun zebra puppet, your child will absolutely love spending time learning about the alphabet. To read our full review and see a few sneak peek photos of the inside, please continue reading below.
Review of All About Reading: Pre-Reading Level
Homeschoolers have been singing praises about All About Reading for some time but to be honest, it seemed a little overwhelming to me. I’m not sure why, honestly, it just seemed like there was so much included and I thought I would be better off with just a simple workbook. Boy was I wrong!
As soon as I opened the box and saw the wonderful books, cards, puppet, and charts, I knew this was going to be a great reading curriculum for Miss 5. Much to my surprise, it was anything but overwhelming. In fact, All About Reading presents the concepts in such a way that it is not only easy for the students to understand but it is also easy and fun for the instructor to teach – a winning combination if you ask me!
The All About Reading Pre-Reading set is the perfect curriculum to introduce to your preschooler or kindergartener. All About Reading Pre-Reading teaches five key skills:
- Print Awareness
- Phonological Awareness
- Letter Knowledge
- Listening Comprehension
- Motivation to Read
These five key skills are taught in such a fun way, that your student won’t even know they’re laying the groundwork for reading skills. The two included read-aloud books include short stories for each letter of the alphabet and are short and sweet, just perfect for short attention spans. For example, in The Zigzag Zebra book, the story for Z was: “What if a zebra wasn’t all stripes? What if some zigzags were zeroes instead? He’d have a polka-dot head!”
What I also love about All About Reading is that it is lightly scripted and their “open and go” lessons make it so easy and stress-free.
In addition, the pages in the activity book are perforated and easy to tear out and use.
What is Included in All About Reading?
- Teacher’s Manual
- My Book of Letters Activity Book
- Capital Letter Alphabet Chart
- Lowercase Letter Alphabet Chart
- Picture Cards and Letter Sound Cards
- The Zigzag Zebra Book
- Lizard Lou Book
- Letter Sounds A to Z App
- Tote Bag
- Ziggy the Zebra Puppet
- Super Cute Animal Stickers
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We started out by opening the teacher’s manual to lesson 1 – capital A. The instructions were very easy to follow – even without any prep work from me beforehand. We sang the alphabet song, pointed to the letters on the capital letter chart as we went, and then read the poem for the letter A in The Zigzag Zebra book. We then did the craft for the letter A and selected one of the activities from page 195 (so many terrific ideas to choose from!).
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Next, we took out Ziggy the Zebra and played “rhyming body parts” with Ziggy. Then, it was read-aloud time and I read aloud to Miss 5 for twenty minutes.
The next day, we learned about capital B. The story about the bears wearing bibs was absolutely darling and resulted in lots of happy giggles from the girls.
Different letters have different tasks, which is great, especially if your child likes routine but doesn’t necessarily like to do the same thing over and over again. For letter B, we played “rhyming cards,” which was a fun activity for both of us.
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We enjoyed our letter lessons so much that while we were taking a quick peek in the rest of the book, we spotted the craft for the letter W and jumped ahead to that lesson. We eventually continued back in order but skipped ahead just this once because the walrus craft just looked too fun to pass up. 🙂 I brought out our moveable alphabet and walrus figure and all three girls – Miss 2, Miss 5, and Miss 7 had a blast working on the craft.
We even put together a fun walrus-themed printable to continue with the walrus theme. It’s available in our resource library for all subscribers. You can sign up here and access all of our free printables instantly.
This All About Reading Pre-Reading kit is available to purchase from Timberdoodle. You can purchase items separately or bundled together in curriculum kits. This kit can either be purchased individually or as part of Timberdoodle’s pre-k curriculum kit. We’ve purchased many items from Timberdoodle over the years – they have SO many fun and educational products, oftentimes priced lower than other retailers.
If you aren’t familiar with Timberdoodle, they offer fantastic learning products for babies all the way up to high school students. We have used their curriculum for many years and have been very happy with not only their products but their amazing customer service as well. Not a homeschooling family? That’s fine too! They have an entire shop of products that would make the perfect gift for any child.
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We were given this kit so that we could review it but as always, our opinions are 100% our own.
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