When teaching phonics, look towards evidenced-based curriculum – Specifically – Direct Instruction programs that have years of documented evidence.

All of these Direct Instruction Programs have exercises within each lesson. We typically use a Direct Instruction Data Sheet to collect data.

1) Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons

This is typically our go-to reading program. It’s by the same author as Reading Mastery (Sigfried Engelmann), yet only around $15-25 vs. $300+.

Typically, we start with 100 Easy Lessons and then use other programs to teach comprehension.

Pros: Evidenced-based, Very affordable, teaches students fairly quickly

Cons: Doesn’t teach comprehension very well, it’s not visually appealing to students, it’s difficult to teach this program in groups

For some kids who need reading broken down even more, we teach lessons 1-13 of the book separately with our written program “Teach Your Child to Read L1-13”

2) Reading Mastery

If you are working in a school with lots of resources and you are looking for a comprehensive program that also teaches comprehension, then Reading Mastery is the way to go.

Pros: Evidenced-based, teaches both decoding and comprehension, comes with coloured readers, visually appealing to students

Cons: Costly

3) Teach Your Child to Read Well

We typically complete Teach Your Child in 100 Easy Lessons, then move to this curriculum to advance students further.

Pros: Evidenced-based, includes fluency-based instructions, includes comprehension

Cons: Not visually appealing, can be difficult to run if you don’t have specific training in the program

Data sheets that we use for Teach Your Child to Read Well include:

• sound fluency check graph 20-66
• word checks frequency graph 20-66
• story frequency graph 0-200
• vocab frequency graph 0-24