The Blue Book

I brought the Learning Language Arts Through Literature - The Blue Book last year when I was going through my ‘must buy stuff now’ phase.  I did end up buying some stuff which will probably never see the light of day at least not at my house (really need to start selling off some of this stuff) but this one has come out three different times so far.

It actually seems like a great program which covers phonics, reading, spelling, grammar, vocabulary, handwriting and higher-order reasoning.  The teacher book has weekly and daily lesson plans, so all you have to do is read ahead and make sure you have all the supplies needed.

The boxed set, which I got, comes with the Teacher’s Manual, 28 Story Readers, Colour Coded Cards (letter cards, sight word cards, game cards, and letter dice) and a Student Activity Book (as mine was 2^nd hand this was missing from the set but was easily replaced).  The program also uses classic children books (like Caps for Sale, and Goodnight Moon) which I was lucky to get about half of them with the program but the rest are available from my local library so I’ve been able to reserve the ones I need as I need them.

When I first got this when Rocket Boy was 4 years old I was into it as soon as it arrived and I was straight into it trying to get Rocket Boy on board but he just wasn’t ready, so it was put away and forgotten about.

As Rocket Boys reading level has improved with the online reading program we use (Reading Eggs, which I’ll post about later) I wanted him reading some real books rather than the ebooks he’s used to so I dug out the Readers from this program and it only took us a week to get through the first 12 books, but the next book was a little too difficult for him, as it was different sounds he had been focusing on.

This week I decided to pull the whole program out and we’ve started it for the last time from the very beginning.  It is a bit simple for him in some areas, but in others he’s right on par.

We did manage to complete a weeks’ worth of lesson plans in one morning, I did skip several things he didn’t need like identifying letters and learning sounds but I’m hoping that we can get through the first 17 lessons in only a couple of months (each lesson is designed to take a week)

I’ll post a weekly wrap up tomorrow which will show the kind of activities Rocket Boy completed this week.