Everything you need to know to get started with All About Reading

The one thing I thought was scary about homeschooling was teaching my kids how to read.  I taught first grade, and an entire class full of students how to read, and yet I still found the idea scary.  Probably because learning how to read is so fundamental to everything we do.  I tried a few different reading curriculum, before finally settling on All About Reading, and over the years of teaching the kids I wrote a few posts on how I make All About reading work for us, and wanted to get this all together in one spot, because I keep getting questions on this topic.  This is four years of teaching how to read worth of hard-earned knowledge for y’all.

(I have affiliate links in here marked with an *)

Preparing your All About Reading lessons

When you pick up your copy of All About Reading*, you also get the letter tiles*. I highly recommend buying one set per kid, and maybe another set for yourself.  The set you buy for yourself, use the magnets that came with the letters on.

The set your kid uses, you’ll be making into a velcro portable word-building set.  I made one for each of the kids, and it was amazing!

Next, let’s prepare your All About Reading lessons.  I figured out to put each of the lessons in mini manila envelopes.  I’ve got an entire post explaining how I put it all together step by step. Two years later I figured out a way to organize the All About Reading lessons even better with the addition of paper clips (that advice is in the middle of some other tips).

Let’s get to teaching those All About Reading Lessons

For our family, each year of All About Reading was taught differently.  So I broke down for you how to teach All About Reading year by year (with the exception of pre-reading* which I never used).

If you’re like me, you are teaching more than 1 child how to read at the same time, or have more than one child in your family, so I posted some suggestions of what to let your other children do while their sibling is reading with you.

Sometimes you need some different ways to practice building words, my kids occasionally got bored with their spelling board, so we switched it up from time to time with different ways to practice words, or this idea to change it up.

Of course, once you’re done with All About Reading, you’re ready to jump into A Book and a Movie (though I’ll confess we did some while the kids were finishing up their All About Reading lessons).