Elementary Readers

Initially, home-school families need to help their child learn to read.  Many families make reading their focus in the early primary years.  These families mainly do Math and Reading.  Once the child can read, English or Language Arts become trickier.  I like Kolbe’s Literature manuals.  The Primary and Elementary Literature manuals have a book list, reader’s questions, and vocabulary from the books.  I had Paul read 20-30 minutes from a book on the list, answer questions, and look up terms in the dictionary.  (This was also a means to practice handwriting.)

Let me recommend adding a Basal reader to English, especially for children in grades one through six.  A Basal reader is a reading book, full of stories, brief biographies, poems, even songs.  This is no longer a popular approach.  However, a Basal reader exposes kids to a huge variety of Literature.  I put together a list of Basel readers to consider.

1. Kolbe offers Catholic National Reader Books, such as Book Three.  

2.  Open Court is one of the oldest series of reading books.  Let’s Kill Dick and Jane explains how Open Court revolutionized reading.  (McGraw Hill has Open Court Reading 2016 and Open Court Reading 2023.  I’m not a fan.  These are newer programs which cost a fortune and require many, many books, assessments, etc to use properly.  I’m not sure I even like the stories!)  Here is a testimonial.  Scroll down for the titles to books in the Basic Reader, or RISE series, the Headway Reader series, and the third  Revised Reader.  If you continue to scroll, you can see the table of contents.  Old fashioned or not, these readers have The Little Red Hen, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. Can you tell I love Open Court readers for younger children? These textbooks are harder to find.  At the bottom are screenshots with prices.

3. I know one family who use McGuffey Readers. Free copies are available on Google Books and The Gutenberg Project.  Families use these primers for literature, morality stories, and for copy work—another neglected teaching tool.  Have your child copy a passage or do a dictation.  Each passage has loads of vocabulary to use for spelling.  

4. I used an older textbook, an anthology, from Houghton Mifflin for Paul.  I bought the workbook; however, I mainly used the textbook as reading enrichment.  Again, you can do dictionary work, copy work, or simple reports from any story.

Below are several screenshots of the books described above.