Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Reading Kingdom-TOS Review

As a member of the TOS Review crew I was recently asked to review a reading program called Reading Kingdom.  Created by Dr. Marion Blank, one of the leading experts in literacy, the program is targeted to children aged 4-10 or grades K-3.

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Unlike many programs, this program does not focus on phonics, rather it works on a series of skills that really zeroes in on the "reading" components.  Reading Kingdom focuses on 6 separate skills: Sequencing, Motor Skills, Sounds, Meaning, Grammar and Comprehension; phonics programs only focus on....sounds.  Head over here to see how it works.

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The student starts out on this program working on their keyboarding and mouse skills, after they are comfortable with that, the student moves on to a Skills Survey to really get to the meat of the program.  This is where I struggled as a mom, I couldn't help them, not even a little bit; if I had it would have skewed the results.  It's critical that the parent let the child do the work on their own, why you ask; because the program completely customizes itself to your child's needs.  If your child is good at sequencing (left to right), then they will skip this and move on.  If they have no trouble with letter recognition and typing individual letters then they skip the next section and move on.  You get the point.  Customization cannot happen if you help your child, they must do it on their own.

We are really enjoying Reading Kingdom, especially now that we are on to the reading part of it, I have to admit the beginning levels were tedious; especially to a mom who was sitting there and couldn't help.  Both kids are moving along and enjoying success, Rylan is really responding well to this; he just wasn't grasping reading through phonics.  I look forward to revisiting this review in a few months and updating on Ry and Sissy's progress.

We all know that every product doesn't work with every child, that's what makes this program so great.  They'll give you a thirty-day free trial to give the product a test run.  If it works for you and you want to purchase it the pricing is as follows: $19.99/month, $199.99 per year, add'l children $9.99/month.  If you absolutely can't afford this, they do have scholarships available.

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If you are more of hard copy person than an online person, Reading Kingdom has you covered there as well.  You can buy the paper and pencil version here for $249.95, it includes a year subscription to the online version of Reading kingdom as well.

We will be revisiting this review in a couple of months to update y'all on our progress.  We really need more time to give a full review, but for now I'm just going to say that we are really enjoying Reading Kingdom and are making more progress than we ever have.  Head over here to see what other crewmates have to say about how Reading Kingdom worked for their families.

Christi
{I received two online subscriptions to Reading Kingdom for the purpose of this review.  I was not required to write a positive review and received no other compensation.}

1 comment:

Reading Kingdom said...

Thank you for taking the time to review our Reading Kingdom program...We are currently in the process of updating the introductory sections of the program to address some of the concerns you raised about timing and increasing the entertainment value. Please do keep us apprised of your children's progress in the program. And if you encounter any issues, please contact us (http://readingkingdom.com/contact/). There may be a simple problem that we can help with. We are also working to update the program to deal with any problems children might be having in using it, so your feedback is very important to us.