This fall, I received All About Spelling to review. When I wrote the review, I had only used the program with my 4th grade daughter. Since that time, I have been using All About Spelling with my 2nd grade son-the one that may be dyslexic – the one that did so poorly on his yearly testing.
It has been wonderful for him! He is halfway through Level One, and I can see improvement in his reading already. He’s doing much better at breaking words down into their sounds and he’s not reversing the order of letters when he spells nearly as often as he was.
If you can’t tell, I’m pretty excited about All About Spelling. So when they sent me the Beehive Reader to review, I was fully expecting to like it. The book exceeded even my high expectations.
First, the book is a bound, hard-cover book. Not flimsy cardstock, not paper with staples, it has a beautiful glossy, hard cover. It’s still a compact size, but much more durable than the other readers we’ve used.Inside the book are 10 different stories. The stories are tied to Level One of the All About Spelling program so they contain words the student can decode based on what he has been learning in his spelling. The following sample page is from second story in the reader – The Nap. That story is introduced after Step 17 in the spelling curriculum.
From the sample, you can see several things about the reader. The font is large and easy to read. There are also a small number of words on each page. Longer passages are divided and placed both above and below the illustration. And I love the illustrations! The illustrations are beautiful but not distracting. There is not a silly stick figure to be found in this book. (Though some of them are a little more cartoonish than this sample.)
Finally, I can’t fail to mention the stories. They are fun stories about children and animals. They are simple, of course, but have held my son’s interest. They stick to what the child has learned and use very few sight words. (It does use the and a before the words are introduced in the program, but those would be nearly impossible to avoid.)
UPDATE: This book is now a part of the All About Reading Program. You can find this complete program at All About Learning Press.