I am part of a reviewing team and I just reviewed this product: Rime to Read
Please feel free to ask me any questions about it
I do not promote it and am not affiliated with it in any way, my job description is to just review and tell people I know would be interested
Here it is:
Rime to Read is a collection of 20 delightful books for beginner readers, brought to life by a learning specialist, a reading teacher and an illustrator. The books are available for online reading, with access to a printing function as well.
The catch is that these books do not just provide reading practice the traditional-leveled-readers-way; instead color-coded “rimes” implicitly teach children how certain letter combinations sound. It’s kind of beginner short vowel phonics but implicitly and with a different twist. Children are not taught phonics rules but they automatically infer the rules from reading and re-reading.
In the words of the website: “Rimes (e.g. the at in Pat, sat and cat) sound and look alike. Rhymes (e.g. care, hair, where) sound alike but do not always look alike.” This visual and auditory consistency is very important for beginning or struggling readers, according to them.
Every short vowel has a set of 4 books dedicated to its rimes, while each rime is colored differently to make it easy for early beginners to distinguish the sounds associated with each rime.
Simple sight words such as “and”, “with”, “like”…etc, are also introduced throughout the story line. These are all in black.
Children should go through the books in order, because each book builds on the previous ones’ vocabulary and includes previous rimes.
Words also have Sound files attached, by clicking on the colored word it plays back…useful for kids to do on their own if they are old enough.
Even though in the FAQ, these books are not recommended before 4, I think these would be great as read-alouds even for children who can't read yet. Just by looking at the colors and hearing their parents, they'd be understanding the rules of reading implicitly, through these colored rimes. The illustrations are very sweet as well!
Each packet of 4 books is for $ 9.99, there are 5 packets in total. You can check the titles as well as the prices here:
http://www.rimetoread.com/books/indexBe sure to stop by the FAQ as well; it is very clear and contains concise support and ideas:
http://www.rimetoread.com/faq/indexYou (or your child) can “read a sample book” on the websites homepage to get the feel of it and see if this would be something for you.
P.S. you won’t be able to print the sample book, but once you buy a set, you’ll access the printing function.
Happy reading!
Potential issues: (They are supposedly working on both of these issues)Different computers show different shades of colors differently, for example I had a problem with the different shades of blue, they seemed very similar to me.
You might run across some coding in the books because the website was recently hacked, in all honesty, I only ran into coding once.
Digg
