How are Homestead Readers different from other leveled books on the market labeled as early reading books? Unlike many early reading books, Homestead Readers progress through well thought-out phonics steps to give the student mastery of one skill before moving on to another skill. The new skill for each story is explained at the beginning of the story so the adult is prepared to help their student learn the new reading skill if they don’t already know it.
Most other early reading books introduce all kinds of words at the same time without the student having the skills to decode those words. This often results in the student looking at the picture to guess what the words are saying rather than truly reading. This is a hard habit to break. Just because a book has few words on a page, does not mean the page will be easy to read.
Are you a parent or grandparent that was never taught phonics? Don’t worry. It really is not hard. Phonics is the key for students to be able to decode words they have never seen. This is an important skill to have! The beginning of each story in the Homestead Readers series will have a page explaining how to go about teaching a student to decode the words that use the new phonetic concept for that story.
Each book has either four or five stories. At the beginning of each story you will find a word list. This list includes words that have not yet been introduced in this book. Practicing this list of words before reading the story will help the child progress through the story more smoothly and feel more successful.
This is a page from Level 5, which includes all five short vowels as well as the sight word ‘the’. The pages are designed to aid beginning readers by using a large font, large spaces between words, large spaces between lines, as well as using a font style that is easy to read.
Donut’s Lamb is a story in Level 11. This story introduces “oo” as in “soon”. There are clear instructions on the word list page to help an adult guide a student through learning this new skill.
Refer to the below chart to learn when a child using one of these popular phonics curriculums could read each of the books in the Homestead Readers series. This chart includes UFLI, Abeka, All About Reading, and more.
Our boys love these! They highlight real kids doing real activities. The books progress very nicely and kids can learn to sound out the words which makes learning to read much easier! I would highly recommend adding these books to your reading program!
Highly recommend these readers! My 2 boys, ages 10 & 8, are reluctant readers but are willing to read these every day. The stories are realistic and entertaining. I’ll ask them, “What was Grant up to today?”, and they enjoy retelling the stories to me.