I love teaching little ones to read! Watching their eyes light up when they finally make the connection between letters, sounds, and words is incredible. It’s literally like a lightbulb went off and when the flip switches, they are so excited!
I was recently given the opportunity to review a beginning reading program from Learning Dynamics with one of my littles. The Learning Dynamics Reading Program was such a cute program!
I worked through it with my four year old. At the time we started, she was just beginning to learn her letters by sight and hadn’t yet started learning their sounds.
But she was eager to give her new school a try!
What Is Reading Dynamics Reading Program?
The entire program comes contained in a sturdy orange box. Inside it there are all sorts of great materials for teaching young children to read, including:
- A Student Workbook (consumable)
- A Lesson Manual
- Music CD
- Four Different Levels of Readers (pictures above)
- Flash cards
- Pop out letter characters to go with each letter (one is pictured below)
The flash cards and letter characters are all in a smaller box inside the bigger box. This made it easy to keep everything together.
This program is easy to use, and truly open and go.
How We Used This Program
My daughter and I worked on her reading for about fifteen minutes three times a week. We listened to the corresponding song on the CD (these songs are catchy, so catchy…), learned about the letter and sound, and she did a page in the workbook.
There was a corresponding letter character for each letter, which was fun. There is a story in the teachers guide that uses the character and many words that start with that letter. These lunch our characters are known as rewards in the program.
They are a lot of fun for free play too!
Brynna really likes learning about letter B because that one is for her name!
The workbook typically asked her to write the letters, and then we talked about the pictures on the page. We talked about the sound and decided if it started with that letter or not. She likes putting an X on the ones that didn’t!
What Did We Think of This Program?
As your child works through the letters, they learn to blend them fairly quickly. I appreciate that they don’t need to have a knowledge of letters before they start, as that is built in. Within four weeks, they are supposed to be reading small words.
My daughter needed a little extra time practicing the letters so we didn’t get to this part of the program, but we will be there soon.
We spent extra time playing letter identification games with the flash cards, reviewing the stories and listening to the songs.
Her knowledge of letters and sounds has increased tremendously, which is so fun!
She’s writing almost all her letters independently, which is incredible. She loves writing, and is seeing herself as a writer now, which is an important developmental step.
She loves having her older siblings read the books to her, and she is starting to point to the words as they do.
This program is very complete. It hits on all the major elements of learning to read – letter identification, letter sounds, blends, and gently introduces students to stringing sounds together to help them glide into reading success.
I love that the lessons are so short. They are perfect for the short attention sound of a four year old.
This program is easy to use with multiple children. Almost all the components are reusable, and the student manual is available for purchase separately.
The books start super simple with just a word or two on each page. Then they slowly increase in length and variety of letter sounds.
If you are looking for a low key, easy to use program to teach your child how to read, I highly recommend Learning Dynamics.
But don’t just take my word for it! To see what other homeschooling families thought, please click the banner below.
