Has any one here used Sing Spell Read Write ?

[eclipse]

I was chatting with my kid's "educational consultant" from our homeschool charter yesterday abouy curiculum for my youngest, who will be kindergarten age in the fall. He said they have "Sing Spell Read Write" that a lot of the families are using for phonics and reading for K and 1st graders. He doesn't have a lot of experience with it and didn't have one on hand to show me, but said he's only heard good things about it. Has anybody here used it or heard much about it? Ds will be a young kindergartener (if we were sending him to school, we would be waiting another year for kindergarten. We're only signing him up with the charter because he really wants to do their enrichment classes like my older kids) and I'm not really concerned about whether he "gets" reading any time soon, so I'm really looking for something that's mostly just fun and I'm wondering if this fits the bill.

[yllek]

SSRW did not work for us. Ds is five-and-a-half now, and we tried SSRW when he turned 5. It is very writing and worksheet-driven. Ds is reading very well now (Level 3 readers and short chapter books), but I feel that if we had stayed with the SSRW pacing, we would not have progressed as far. There's only so much my guy could manage if there was too much writing involved. Separating the expressive language, handwriting, reading and phonics into distinct activities has allowed him to develop as fast or as slow as he needed to in each area. SSRW puts too much of these things together for it to work well for us.

[eclipse]

Thanks. If it's writing intensive, it's probably not for him. He has some fine motor delays and, while he does need to work on it, I don't want anything that will frustrate him. He's only in the last couple of months been willing to try to draw anything, and I don't want to reverse the process. We'll probably look for something else.

[Momma Aimee]

I think dotcomdiva does -- here is her blog: http://satorismiles.com/

[AAK]

Originally Posted by eclipse

Thanks. If it's writing intensive, it's probably not for him. He has some fine motor delays and, while he does need to work on it, I don't want anything that will frustrate him. He's only in the last couple of months been willing to try to draw anything, and I don't want to reverse the process. We'll probably look for something else.

Sounds like you might like the activities in the back of "Reading Reflex". The book is for parents. The beginning discusses reading, etc. but the ending is their program. Very little writing, lots of manipulating. A bit of prep work to make tiles but it is fun. My dd thought of it as a lot of games. The phonemic awareness stuff was very helpful.

Amy

[Shelsi]

We're currently using it. I pulled my ds out of public kindy over xmas break. Academically he was keeping up with his peers but there were other issues that caused us to pull him out (mostly the Disney movie they watched every day and the corporal punishment).

We got the Kindergarten combo pack that has both kindy and 1st grade. It's OK but I'm not enthralled with it. I don't feel like there's much writing for the kindy portion. There's 2 books for 1st grade, the 1st book is ridiculously easy (reviewing each letter of the alphabet) but then the 2nd book is where all the writing comes in.

There are hardly any songs for the kindergarten section and honestly it just feels like they hurriedly added on the kindergarten curriculum just to get more buyers. It definitely was not worth the high cost of it IMO.

Ds is about 1/4 of the way through the 2nd 1st grade book and he's doing ok so I'm not going to change it but I definitely won't be buying the next step either.

Oh and he still can't quite read on his own, not even level 1 readers, but ds also has no desire to read so the only time he reads is when he's forced to. I know he could if he really wanted to though as I've seen him decipher directions from his favorite Wii game.