It seems to me from reading COAH and what other people are doing that combing All About Reading with Abeka Phonics is rather a popular option. I have decided to go ahead and give that a try mostly because my son really likes the Abeka phonics materials (they are colorful and have cute pictures) but also needs a bit more of a hands on approach. But I am not sure the best way to make this happen and thought since other people seem to have done this too, I thought I might be able to get some advice from those more experienced. I have purchased AAR Level 1 and am trying to combine that with Abeka K5 phonics. Do these seem to be compatible levels or does anyone think I am not pairing that very well? Any help at all would be quite helpful. Thanks so much!!!
We recently combined AAR with Abeka phonics, funnily enough it wasn’t something I knew people did and it also wasn’t planned, but due to a difficult pregnancy my Grade 1 child wanted some workbook work for days when AAR wasn’t happening. We used it just as a workbook with help figuring out the sounds of phonograms we hadn’t learned yet. We used Abeka K5 alongside AAR2 I would say AAR 2 was closer to the phonics learned in K5.
Hi! We combined AAS (NOT AAR) and Abeka Language and Abeka Letters & Sounds together and it worked well. AAS is great for drilling phonics rules and the Abeka worksheets help me make sure they can do those things independently instead of me leading them through each lesson like they do in AAS. I didn’t use AAR much other than the readers because my kiddos loved their books better than Abeka. But I like having the Abeka worksheets as I’m more of a traditional gal and like to see that my kids can do it on their own.
Abeka moves faster than AAR and AAS so you may have to introduce something new on the Abeka worksheets, but it’s pretty easy to manage 
Thank you so much, I can’t believe I confused AAR and AAS. I looked at AAR and realized it doesn’t at all follow Abeka and how in the world put these two things together. I will start again and look at AAS when we are ready to start spelling.