Although HomeschoolChristian.com is compatible with most browsers, it is optimized for those browsers which are XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2 compliant. For quicker loading and a more enjoyable browsing experience, we recommend Mozilla Firefox.
Custom Search

Meet the Phonics

by Kathy Oxley

Reviewed by Anna1111

My little one just finished all fifteen books in the Starfall Learn to Read set.

I chose to purchase the books because I wanted my little one to learn to relate to books as books and not just words on a computer screen. I want her to love the feel of a book in her hand. She has fallen in love with the books, and loves to get them out of the box, read them to friends, and in general just admire them. When reading time comes, she will ask to read several of them and I have to tell her that is too much!

The Starfall website provides a lot of wonderful activities that help her learn material, like - games involving silent e, videos on the SH sound, and demos of each book being read aloud. You click on the word and (usually) it is sounded out, sound by sound while that letter or letter combination is highlighted in red.

My little one asks to do Starfall (on the computer) as a treat outside of school time - in place of having the video of her choice - so that's pretty high praise.

Drawbacks

  1. The pictures correspond exactly to the words. I find that by the third reading of the book, she has memorized the text except a couple of words, because she can look at the pictures and remember the text pretty well from there.
  2. It is NOT a complete phonics program. (Neither the website nor the book set provides sufficient instruction to really teach a child to read.) To teach phonics well you really need an exhaustive text that has phonics drill - and this is not it. It doesn't teach all of the common letter combinations in English, and perhaps not even a majority of them. But, it is a great supplement to other, more serious materials.
  3. Some words are presented out of sequence in the book ("falls" when the sound being worked in is short e and an ahh sound hasn't been taught yet).
  4. Some words are taught as sight words that shouldn't be - but this is pretty minimal.
  5. The books are short and non-repetitive. They don't provide sufficient practice for a child to easily recognize all (for example) their CVC words. (I use Bob Books for that. See the review here.)

One drawback to the site itself - in the store they offer a book on Darwin. This tells me that I cannot leave the computer programs unsupervised to teach my child, but have to vet whatever they present.

What I felt these materials did (and, what I wanted them for) is to help my little one keep loving books while going through the challenge of some not-always-fun phonics drill with the rest of our reading instruction time. She loves these books, and they help her love reading.

Recommendation: I have been very pleased with them overall.

HomeschoolChristian.com resources related to this review:

HomeschoolChristian.com's Language Arts Resources Section for tips on teaching spelling and more!
Review of Bob Books
Review of Meet the Phonics videos
Review of Rocket Phonics
Review of Reading With Phonics
Review of Sing, Spell, Read, and Write, Pre-Kindergarten
Review of Sing, Spell, Read, and Write, Kindergarten and Level 1 Combo Kit
Review of Sound Beginnings
Review of Phonetic Zoo spelling program
Review of Calvert's Interactive Spelling & Vocabulary
Review of Sequential Spelling
Review of Watchword

Find more helpful reviews on HomeschoolChristian.com's Review Page Index!

Reviews represent the opinions of the authors rather than the views of HomeschoolChristian.com.