I plan on using Abeka for phonics for K. I am using it for 1st with my oldest and my 2nd will be in K next year. I didn’t use Abeka with my oldest, but I want to this time around. What all would you suggest I buy? I am tempted to just buy the complete parent and child kit, but I wasn’t sure if I needed it all or not.
For teaching phonics I used these:
Curriculum/Lesson Plans
Basic Phonics Flash Cards
Phonics Charts and Games
Basic Phonics Charts (not scheduled but useful for practicing Charts 1-8 in K5)
I made my own Blend Cards, one/two vowel word cards, and clue word cards. I also have the Learning Games, just to add more variety to the review games.
The Letter Picture Flashcards are used a lot in the teacher guide, it would be good to have them, unless you want to make your own pictures.
For the child I used the Letters and Sound workbook, My Blend and Word Book, and the set of readers.
Hope this helps!
I use the curriculum/lesson plans/teachers guide (can’t remember which they call it) all the time along with the workbooks. There is Letters and Sounds as the main phonics workbook and then we also use the handwriting workbook right along with it.
The kits include stuff for math, phonics, and handwriting so if you weren’t going to do math, then the kits wouldn’t be worth it.
The basic phonics flashcards are used a lot and I think worth it. I also like most of the other flashcards, although I agree you could easily make your own or just write words on the board. We use the Letter Picture flashcards all the time and also the one and two vowel word cards. We did use the blend A and B cards but they don’t practice just the blends all that long before moving onto words so although I liked them, I am not sure they were worth the money.
I also like the phonics games and learning games (we have the number games too.) I honestly didn’t think my son would be too into them since they are not all that different from each other and not really a true game, but he actually really took to them and we try to use them at least once or twice a week. It makes reviewing things on flashcards more fun. But I must say if you look up the games individually (not in the kits) you will notice that they offer two versions. For the learning games there is learning games and learning games homeschool version. There is no difference other than the size. This is true for a whole bunch of there things, anything that has some sort of poster or picture. The homeschool versions come smaller. If I had the money to rebuy some of those things I would buy the bigger size even though it is quite a bit more money. I want to hang some of these things up on the wall and since the homeschooling versions are just the size of a regular piece of paper, they get lost. The learning games I think would be really cool if they were bigger, but even still, I do like them.
I like the readers and would suggest getting some of the extra ones as I find my son wants to read more than just what is given.
I hope this helps, feel free to ask if you have any other questions.
Sabrina
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