The Complete Book of Phonics

My 5yr old boy loves it he actually asked when we could do the next chapter, the assignments are fun and easy to understand its a really great book to get your kids started in phonics

This book is appealing to children who adore bright and colorful workbooks. Its low price for an inch-thick full-color workbook is its main attraction.

However, its content is badly lacking! First, it is repetitive, going back over the same sounds in the same way multiple time. It is deceptive, trying to convince a parent that it contains three years' worth of phonics work when it doesn't move into the latter part of K until 2/3rds of the way through the book. It is full of errors--as a typical example, on a page that is supposed to be about the short A, "baby" is one of the words that the child is supposed to read. Yeah. Right. There are fewer than a dozen types of exercises, which are recycled in endless repetition. The pictures are sometimes so ambiguous that I have to look in the answer section to try to figure out what they are supposed to be. It handles many topics very poorly--for example, it doesn't teach long vowels until several hundred pages of exercizes, and then it throws FOUR different ways of making a long A at the child on the same page! It doesn't cover anything but one sound for each consonant, some basic blends, and simple long and short vowels--nothing in the least bit tricky, and nothing beyond the first grade level.

As a supplement, used with caution, for a good reading program, this has some value. My son is fond of worksheets, goodness knows why, and the ease of this book gives him confidence in his reading. But as a primary resource, its usefulness is very, very small.

This is the third book in the "Complete Book" series we have utilized in our homeschool. The book is a hefty 352 page phonics program kindergarten through second grade. The lessons teach the consonants, vowels, blends, diagraphs, phonograms, letter sound correspondence, patterns, decoding unfamilar words, spelling and pronunciations skills. There is plenty of coloring, cutting and pasting sprinkled throughout. The book is child/parent friendly with clear, easy instructions to follow and is printed in full color. We have utilized two other "brand name" phonics programs in our homeschool, but this is the winner hands down!

It is a very good book for a kindergartener to learn phonics and to start reading. This is the only book I have been using on my 5 year old and we are able to learn really quick. It is very well arranged and worth the money.