Essentials 2nd Edition by Logic of English is flashy. I'm seldom seduced by bright pretty colors in book form, but this program is pretty. The flash cards, game cards, rule cards and pamphlets are NICE! It is so flexible too. Each aspect of this program works for multiple levels, making it wonderful for large families. Essentials covers phonics, vocabulary, spelling, grammar & basic composition taught in a logical approach to encourage critical thinking. It's fully scripted for new teachers, but practically limitless in possibilities for creative teachers. We also received an eReading Book & teacher's guide.
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It has a word list and poetic story for each lesson. The children enjoyed reading through the list and thought the stories were really funny. It also has cute pictures for each story. I personally prefer the children to read Bible and Biographical texts instead of nonsense, but it was a fun change.
My favorite thing about this program is the color coding. The three levels have their own color in the HUGE teacher's manual. That helped me so much. Like I've said before, I dislike reading instructions and usually try to skip that step. When I first saw this teacher's manual, I felt like hiding. When I say HUGE, I mean HUGE! Yep, it's big. It is actually interesting though. Like I said, it's color coded, which totally appeals to me. I color code everything, even the towels in the bathroom. There are boxes on the side with tips, notes & ideas. The lessons have all kinds of fun steps for teaching the phonograms and parts of speech. I also love that it teaches the Latin roots and meanings for the suffixes & prefixes. (...Did I remember to tell you it's color coded and HUGE?)
Our 9 year old (Littlest Princess) was very excited about this program. We don't do many workbooks or flash cards and my little nerds can get excited about such things sometimes. I expected it to wear off after a while, but it didn't. She has genuinely enjoyed working through the various aspects of Logic of English's phonics. An additional fun thing I found is a YouTube channel with lessons for the children and workshops for teachers. AWESOME! In addition to Essentials 2nd Edition they also have several Foundations programs for younger children that look fun.
There are 15 five day lessons making this only a 75 day program. I took more time since I was working with both our Littlest Princess and the 13 year old boy. I wanted to evaluate both of them as I went. Our 13 year old has struggled with phonics and reading, much like I did at his age. I was delighted that his reading skills are better than what I thought and he was kinda bored with the preliminary stuff. Once we got into the spelling though, he started to enjoy it more. (If a boy can enjoy 'school'...) I've definitely seen improvement in both of them. I think some of the lessons were even good for the older two to help them with, like the parts of speech. It definitely reinforced some things.