About
77 self-paced lessons blend systematic phonics instruction and sight word acquisition with right brained strategies such as visuals, movement, story, humor, and hands-on activities. Lessons are laid out in detail so you know exactly what to do without being a specialist in education. All resources and assessments are provided for you to print from your computer.
Essential Resources for Easy-for-Me™ Reading
Easy-for-Me™ is your teaching guide. Along with this Teaching Manual, you will need:
- Alphabet Tales.
- SnapWords® List A.
- Easy-for-Me™ Children’s Readers, Set A.
- Alphabet Teaching Cards are recommended but not absolutely essential.
- SnapWords® Numbers, Colors, Days, Months & Seasons are recommended but not essential.
Follow the links to find the resources you don’t have already, or if you are starting out, The Easy-for-Me™ Teaching Kit 1 will provide all the resources you need. If you are teaching a whole class, your best option is the Easy-for-Me™ Complete Teaching Kit.
Learn more about Easy-for-Me™ and why it works
Background
Of course, I was aware of the “correct” way to teach reading! As it happened, however, I was teaching a group of young children who were bright and creative, but not successfully learning or remembering much of what I taught them when symbols were involved. At the same time, I was in graduate school searching for the answer to why sometimes bright kids don’t learn. The combination of studying the researcher/experts and working with actual kids was magical. I had the chance to learn from researchers as I learned from kids what worked best for them. Easy-for-Me™ was the tangible outgrowth of that time.
The basis for Easy-for-Me™
In designing this program, rather than focusing on tradition, I focused on how kids learn. Easy-for-Me™ is based on the work of many researchers including Leslie Hart.
In Human Brain and Human Learning, Leslie Hart states: “... assumptions have been made: that if a subject is fragmented into little bits, and the student is then presented with the bits in some order that seems logical to somebody, the student will be quite able to assemble the parts and merge with the whole - even though never having an inkling of the whole” (103).
In other words, somewhere, sometime, somebody determined that the proper sequence for teaching reading is to present a child with a series of ordered symbols (their ABCs), ask them to memorize the symbols, and later, specific groupings of these symbols (words) so that they will be able to recall them rapidly and extract meaning from them. They are given no rationale for the necessity of learning these symbols, no context for the task, and no goal that would explain the point of the exercise.
Easy-for-Me™ is based on research
Read the research here in the Easy-for-Me™ Reading FAQ section at the bottom of the page.
How it works
Easy-for-Me™ encapsulates all the knowledge we have about how young children learn naturally and uses that knowledge to successfully teach children to read. Read more here in the Reading FAQ section at the bottom of the page.
SECTION 1 – The Sequence of Lessons. Section 1 is the solid foundation we lay to get children reading successfully. They are going to read using just a handful of tools, so they grasp the why of reading and the how before they are bombarded with too many details. This approach is magical for beginners and for older non-readers alike. The gaps are firmly closed, only what is essential is taught, every new element is tied to previous concepts, and all teaching is done in a way that goes directly into the child’s powerful visual and body memory.
By lesson 20, children will have learned 8 sounds and 4 words and they will be able to read the first two books.
By lesson 30, still with only 8 sounds and with 23 sight words learned, the child will have been able to read 7 books.
SECTION 2 continues teaching sounds, blending them, writing them, making words, learning related sight words, and reading books. By the time children reach section 2, they understand what reading is so we are just adding to their tool chest and their pace has picked up a lot.
SECTION 3 completes the process of learning to read. All the remaining sounds are taught along with the remaining 5 SnapWords® from List A and the final 7 readers are read.
Parent Reviews:
"I am a homeschooling mom of four and we absolutely love your learning to read products! I have been using the Easy-for-Me Teaching Manual with my 6yo this school year, and she is so excited to be able to read by herself and finds all the activities to be a lot of fun. My 5yo and 4yo can't wait to start using the program as well!"
"All three of my children are having huge problems making sense of symbols, be they letters or numbers. Having to manipulate these symbols to add or subtract or blend to actually make words is extremely difficult. The information at the beginning of the teachers manual seemed to really have grasped these discrepancies that dyslexic children have. I have not found anything else that puts it in such great terms."