All About Reading: Use with Struggling, Typical, and Gifted Readers

As a seven-year user of this curriculum, one of my favorite features of All About Reading (and, by extension, All About Spelling) is that it is a program that fills the needs for struggling readers, typical readers, and gifted readers. I don't have a hands-down, strong recommendation for every subject (e.g., I don't have one for math), but I can truly say I've recommended this program to my in-real-life friends countless times over the years, and one of my points is that we mothers of large families don't know what kind of students our various children will be, but having this program on hand will meet the reading needs of nearly any kind of student.

• The levels are not grade- or age-based, so the child just works through them at his own pace until he's a competent reader. Maybe he finishes the program at age 6 because he's so advanced, maybe he finishes at age 12 because he's learning more slowly, but either way, the program meets those needs.
• AAR teaches through all forms of learning--visual, auditory, kinesthetic--so will work through whatever is your child's best learning style.

In fact, AAR was designed by a mother for her son who was so profoundly learning disabled that it was recommended that he be institutionalized. Instead, this mother taught him how to read and that enabled him to become a functioning member of society and holds a job! Watch the story here.

In my own personal experience, I've known three real-life friends who switched to using AAR with their children who had dyslexia or a dyslexia-type learning struggle to great success, and I share their quotes below.

I'd love to hear in comments from anybody who has found AAR or AAS useful with their struggling (or gifted) readers!

From a homeschooling mother of seven:  "I highly recommend AAR. While my first child was a natural born reader my second struggled initially. After we switched to AAR from another program she began to make great progress and now enjoys reading in the 4th grade. My son who is in the 1st grade is using AAR and is doing very well reading a wide variety of books at his level."

From a homeschooling mother of five: "Our family has been using AAR for the last two school years. My struggling reader has come along way. He is now reading books independently. While he isn’t at grade level yet, he really loves to read. He and his sister often squabble over who will do their All About Reading lesson first, as they enjoy it so much."  

From a homeschooling mother of three: "From early on, I had my suspicions that my middle child approached everything…differently. He had some unusual speech patterns, his way of thinking was so much more abstract that I ever thought possible in a child, and he had some rather goofy quirks. When the time for him to enter Kindergarten arrived, I just couldn’t see him thriving in a public school environment, and since we were considering pulling our oldest from elementary school (due to numerous red flags), my husband and I made the decision to homeschool.

"Fast forward 3 1/2 years, and that awkward little boy is now an awkward 8yo boy who’s been struggling to read since we began.

"After trying several other reading programs, which always started out okay, but gradually turned into unmitigated disasters accompanying tears (mine) and teeth-gnashing (his), I needed to take a step back. I’ve had this notion for a number of years that dyslexia was the culprit (which was recently confirmed by a dyslexia tutor), and I was familiar with AAR as an Orton-Gillingham method, which is excellent for dyslexic readers because of it’s multi-sensory approach. I recently chose to finally take the leap to purchase AAR Level 1, as my son’s self-esteem was beginning to suffer, and we needed something more multi-sensory that what the other programs provided.

"We’re still only about halfway through Level #1, but I’m seeing a huge difference already. When we first began, he was extremely enthusiastic about his reading lessons, especially enjoying the letter tiles. Now that we’re halfway into it, he does occasionally put up a little bit of a protest, but the thing to remember with dyslexia is that the energy it takes for them to concentrate on the written word is exhausting. I try to keep the lessons to 20 minutes or less, because any more would just be lost on him as he shuts down. But the wonderful thing about AAR is that we can typically get through an entire lesson in that short amount of time. The activity pages from the Student Handbook are always a lot of fun for him and helps to break up the more rigorous work of decoding/blending new words. While other programs we’ve used have been solely bookwork, AAR has multiple activities in each lesson, which is really beneficial. One moment we’re going over letter and word cards, then we leave the school table to work with the magnetic letter tiles, then we do the activities, which allow him to use pretty much all his senses. It’s this multi-sensory approach that I believe is getting him over some tall hurdles.

"I’m so thankful to have finally added AAR to our homeschool, because even in the short amount of time we’ve used it, my son’s confidence has increased, and while his progress is made up of baby steps, I’m seeing progress that I hadn’t seen before."