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Maggie
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| Posted: May 05 2011 at 8:22am | IP Logged
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Hi moms~
I wanted to post this to help some of you in your assessment of Delightful Reading.
Overall, I have to say that for my family, it was worked ok and is serving as a bridge between 100 EZ and whatever we do next.
I think that your success with the program may completely depend on your teaching style and your children's learning style.
We were so very very excited to get this, and I had a bias towards it since the author was my next door neighbor for two years and is a wonderful, beautiful soul. Imagine my delight when a Charlotte Mason-style homeschooler moved in right next door!
Lanaya accomplishes what she sets out to do. She wrote this program for her second child who seemed to need a different approach than her first, and it worked beautifully for him.
The bane of the program: Cutting out all the pieces to the movable alphabet and the poems, etc. I still have not finished the cutting. I detest cutting things apart, though. It's like purgatory for me. Hmmm...I think I should just offer it up for some poor souls in purgatory, now that I think about it.
The lessons are set-up like this:
First, word-building exercises. Quite literally, your child uses a moveable alphabet to make a lot of word families. This is partially a phonics approach and partially sight-reading by memorizing families and like-sounds. This goes on for a long time...and got to be quite cumbersome for my dd...I ended up truncating the lessons and not doing even half of the combinations because my dd started to really dislike it.
For instance, you take the endings of words: -od,-ad, -an, -all, etc, and you put letters in front of them to create new words and have your child write these in their new word book. You move from these almost endless exercises to the poems.
She takes 4 very classic poems and builds her lessons around each individual poem.
For example, the first poem a child works with (after completing initial word-building exercises), is "Rain" by Robert Louis Stevenson.
She breaks the poem into about 10 lessons.
In each lesson, she breaks the poem down line by line.
The first lesson takes the first line of the poem and has your child focus on new words. Mom writes them on a wipe board, and you talk about the meanings, etc of the word.
For instance, you take the word "rain" and talk about it. All children will be familiar with "rain". You then take the ending of the word -ain and put letters in front of it to make new words. You talk about the definitions of these new words, etc.
You do this with all the other words in the first line of rain, creating a vocabulary of words that your child will recognize.
After doing this, you take some of those new words and create new sentences.
You also mix up the lines in the poems themselves to create new sentences with new meanings.
This structure and format, though it changes slightly with each lesson and each poem, is the general gist of it...making new words out of familiar words and building a vocabulary.
I have had to do quite a bit of tweaking to make it more fun. After about 4-5 lessons, my dd's enthusiasm for reading class plummeted. We had originally started with Teach Your Child in 100 Easy Lessons, which she really liked. I think she relied on the similar structure of each lesson and the predictability.
This is more loosely focused and heavily based on sight-reading, which I was not completely prepared for; however, it is how Charlotte Mason advocated teaching reading, if I had really thought about it.
You can pace the lessons as you desire. In fact, I have broken up 1 lesson over the course of a week or week and a half, which I think also bothers dd because she likes to visually see her progress in moving through a text, etc.
For the record, we have had the book for about 2 months, and we are only getting through the first poem, probably this week or next...mostly because I have been rather unexcited about it.
It's just not...well...as fun as I had hoped. While I certainly do not expect entertainment during reading lessons, for some reason, this became tedious.
However, I almost hesitate to say that because I think this would be a beautiful approach for some families and their children.
It has been a sufficient "in-between" 100 Easy and whatever we do next...a bridge, perhaps.
I think it would greatly benefit by supplementing with Explode the Code or something along those lines, as I am very phonics based myself.
The packaging is beautiful, as is the book and supplementing texts. A+ for aesthetics. :)
The program is very mom-intensive, but that does not bother me as I like to "hold my children's hands" during the reading process. :)
It boils down to this: If your child is a sight-reader, it might work very well for you.
Feel free to post any questions you may have.
Hope this helps a little bit.
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Wife to dh (12 years) Mama to dd (10) ds (8), dd (1), ds (nb) and to Philip Mary (5/26/09), Lucy Joy (12/6/09), and Margaret Mary (3/6/10) who entered Heaven before we had a chance to hold them.
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Grace&Chaos
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| Posted: May 05 2011 at 9:38am | IP Logged
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Maggie wrote:
It has been a sufficient "in-between" 100 Easy and whatever we do next...a bridge, perhaps.
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Completely agree with your assessment. We're just getting through the second selection with my ds just turned 6 (kinder). I think our next step is/will be just reading practice with easy readers like either the McGuffey's (going through the Primer at the same time) and/or the Sonlight I Can Read It series (they remind me of the Lobel books) with ofcourse all the great readers. And copywork!! to reinforce the reading.
As for phonics  not sure yet. Leaning towards leaving it informal for another year for my ds.
Although I am trying the McAlister's Nuts and Bolts Guide to the Writing Road to Reading with his older sister (2nd grader) in the fall (along with cards and CD) for the purpose of learning some rules. I want to see how that goes.
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Blessings,
Jenny
Mom to dds(00,03) and dss(05,06,08,09)
Grace in Loving Chaos
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Becky Parker
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| Posted: May 07 2011 at 7:47am | IP Logged
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Maggie, thank you so much for taking the time to post this review! I keep going back and forth between buying something like this (or something like AAR),and using the tried and true method that has worked for my other kids (it's free and has no bells and whistles!). My ds in 1st grade has struggled a bit but using the Charlotte Mason method is helping him now. I didn't buy anything, I just took the information from Simply Charlotte Mason and applied it. Maybe I should just continue with what I'm doing. (The lure of buying something new is always difficult for me to resist though!!) 
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Becky
Wife to Wes, Mom to 6 wonderful kids on Earth and 4 in Heaven!
Academy Of The Good Shepherd
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Grace&Chaos
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| Posted: July 29 2011 at 9:07pm | IP Logged
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I've been using the program and enjoy this way of teaching reading. I was trying to explain to some friends the process of teaching reading the CM way and came across this you tube presentation: Delightful Reading explained by Sonya from SCM.
In case you haven't seen it, I hope it helps someone else too!
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Blessings,
Jenny
Mom to dds(00,03) and dss(05,06,08,09)
Grace in Loving Chaos
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4Real Forums : Language Arts Come Alive
Topic: Delightful Reading Review
