Beginning Reading at Home
(Children 3-6 Years)
By Elizabeth Peterson
Illustrated by Jeanette

A basic phonic approach for parents and teachers of young children (3-6). Includes a simple readiness text. One set of ten kits contains everything needed to introduce all the consonant sounds, short vowels, five consonant digraphs, several long vowels and a few non-phonetic words.

The kits are colorfully designed by Elizabeth Peterson, a reading specialist.

BLUE cards present the letter names and sounds with clarity and simplicity.
GREEN cards with raised lettering allow the child to feel and experience the shape of the letters.
ORANGE cards enable the child to blend letter sounds into words and to begin reading.
YELLOW cards go together to make story books in kits 2-10. (9 books in all).

The fun and excitement of the world of reading now become real to the child.

A guidebook is included to show the way the materials in the kits can help a child to read in a FUN-FILLED FIVE MINUTES A DAY.

BEGINNING READING AT HOME has had eight printings and is sold all over the world: Canada,Europe, Mexico, New Zealand, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Singapore, Mozambique, etc.

U.S. parents living in foreign countries take the program along and as a result, orders follow from schools and missionaries.

ISBN 0-938911-00-7
10 Kits
$42.00

Reviews:

Beginning Reading at Home by Betty Peterson, is as good a set of materials for its purpose as I have seen. In most respects it is better. In a series of 10 kits, the series introduces selected letters and letter groups and shows what sounds they are associated with. To begin with, the children are provided with enough vowels and consonants to permit making a few words, so that they can feel that they are reading right from the start. Each kit follows a natural progression from letter recognition to sound association to monosyllabic words. By kit 6 the children are reading sentences. Consonant digraphs are also included, such as ch and sh, along with fixed sequences like qu. Children need to know that sometimes letters and groups stand for single sounds. The series rightly includes lessons on ck, allowing the learners to associate this consonant sequence with short vowel sounds. In this way, they learn that vowel sounds, ambiguous in isolation, are predictable in context.

The series commends itself for several reasons:

It introduces the children to a theoretically correct understanding of how English sounds and letters are related.

Its subject matter and sequence are carefully considered, moving from letter recognition to sound association to sounds and letters in words and sentences.

Letter frequency provides the basis for the sequence, allowing the children to master a large number of words fairly early.

The subject matter and illustrations are, in my opinion, sure to appeal to children in the 3-6 year age group.

I am most favorably impressed, however, by the fact that these books, appealing an unintimidating, allow the children to acquire easily the most important understanding of all: that print stands for spoken words and that by using the sounds of letters and letter groups they can identify in print words they already know. Once the children have this understanding, progress in reading is easy. I would certainly use these kits if I had a small child of my own.

F.H. Brengleman, Professor of Linguistics and Reading
California State University of Fresno