Improving our Reading with Reading Kingdom - Homeschool Curriculum Review

My youngest daughter struggled with reading and spelling when she attended public school.  The first thing we started working on when we started homeschooling was how to improve her reading and spelling.  Although she has improved tremendously she is not where I would like for her to be.  I am always on the lookout for ways to help her improve more.  I was introduced to Reading Kingdom through the Homeschool Review Crew.  I did some research and figured we should give it a try.  We were offered a year subscription in exchange for our honest review.  When my daughter was in public school she was taught spelling and reading by sight words.  She had no idea how to phonetically sound out a word so, when we started homeschooling I started teaching her how to spell and read by doing phonics.  However, that has only gone so far because many of the English words can't be "sounded out", you know we have so many exceptions to the rules.  To my surprise reading requires six skills and Reading Kingdom teaches all six.

About Reading Kingdom

Reading Kingdom is an online reading program that teaches children how to read.  They teach by using all six of the required skills to learn to read.  Those six skills are sequencing, writing, sounds, meaning, grammar, and comprehension.  It is recommended for children ages 4 - 10.

How we used it

I had my daughter take the placement test so that she could be placed in the level that was appropriate for her.  The placement test was lengthy, but we survive! (smile)   Once she was placed in her level we logged on 3-4 times a week and did a lesson a day.  The program was very easy to navigate, once I logged in my daughter just clicked on her name and the session starts.  She was given a word and had to type it in.  If the word was spelled right she would get a good job if it was spelled wrong the owl would tell her she spelled it wrong and then show her how to spell it.  She is then showed a passage which is read to her.  There are about 15 exercises but they don't take long to complete at all.

What my daughter thought

I asked my daughter what she thought about the program and she said, "I like it it has helped me read a little better.  Most of the words were really easy.  I did not like when I was trying to spell a word out and the owl rushed me and would start to tell me how to spell it before I could do it on my own.  I also did not like how slow she read it made me bored.  I would rate it a 7 out of 10."

My thoughts

I love the way Reading Kingdom is set up it made it very easy for my daughter to use without a lot of instruction from me.  She was able to do it very independently.   I felt like the program was a little slow for her, but sitting through it with her I feel it does a great job teaching how to read and spell.  It is very repetitive.   I love the different activities they use to enforces the proper spelling of a word.  There is even on memory retention exercises.  If you have a kid that likes to know how much longer or how much more until they are finished there is a chart in the upper right corner they will show how many problems they have complete to how many total problems.  Although it was not the best fit for my daughter I think it is a good program overall.

Crew members were able to review Reading Kingdom and ASD Reading.  You can read about what they have to say here.