Review ~ Reading Kingdom
We love this reading, writing and spelling program! We’ve used it in our homeschool lessons and our kids just love it and make quick progress.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.
For this past month, we have been testing out The Reading Kingdom program.
The Reading Kingdom is an online learning-to-read program for children aged 4 to 10, designed by Dr. Marion Blank.
When they have finished the program they should be reading and writing at a third-grade level. The program uses six skills to teach both phonics and whole language, the skills are sequencing, motor skills, sounds, meaning, grammar, and comprehension.
There is a guidebook here you can download, that explains how The Reading Kingdom is different from other reading programs.
I decided to use this program with my daughter who turned 8 recently. She has been working on another phonics program and is 3/4's of the way through that. I felt like this would be a good review for her, and help build writing and keyboarding skills.
The program starts out with a skills assessment test called Seeing Sequences and Letter Land. You are not supposed to help your child with the questions, other than to provide help using the mouse or keyboard.
The test is supposed to find out what skills your child has so the program will place them at the right level. Each session of the test takes about 15 minutes. Even with dd doing more than one session a day, it took her about two weeks to complete this section.
Seeing Sequences shows the child a word, then has a line under it with a mixture of leaders. The child is asked to click on the letters in the right order. As the child moves on it gets a little harder.
Letter Land gives keyboarding practice. You have the option of having your child use the on-screen keyboard, or using your computer's keyboard. This section was teaching the keyboard layout and how to capitalize letters.
When dd misspelled the word "girl", she was shown the word on the screen. Then it would show her the same word in a line of other words, and ask her to click on it.
It repeated this a few times, then asked her to find partial words "gir", "rl". After this, it asked her to spell the word again.
Once the testing section was finished, she was placed into level 1. The program works through storybooks using the same methods used in the skills test.
Children are shown sentences and asked to pick out the missing word from a list. If they get it correct then they continue on, if it is wrong then it practices building and recognizing the word.
I was surprised, that dd was placed in level 1 since she is already reading stories like The Little Red Hen and the Gingerbread Boy on her own. But after seeing the words that Reading Kingdom starts off with I can understand.
Most reading programs I've looked at start off with short phonic words, cat, hat, sat, Sam, etc. Reading Kingdom starts off using words like girl, kid, and some. Words she can read but are not the normal beginner reader words.
If your child is placed at a level that is to easy or hard for them, you can contact the company and they will adjust this level for you.
Overall my daughter has enjoyed using this program. She did find the testing session long and drawn out, but after that, she has like using it. Most days she wants to use multiple sessions. That's fine with me!
I think this program works well for visual learners and it is a fun reading program for kids to use. I do lean more towards teaching reading with a phonics method, and we haven't moved far enough into the program to really see how it handles phonics. I have seen it teaching some letter sounds, but it seems to be only when the child gets a word wrong.
I do like to start out teaching the sounds and blends then move into recognizing whole words. So I would prefer it if the program started with short vowels and moved up from that point.
