We received a huge box of materials and initially I was completely overwhelmed with the amount of stuff and information! One thing about IEW - their focus is on teaching me how to teach, not just what words to say to go through the motion of teaching. There is an inherent internalizing of their materials and philosophy as a teacher that is necessary before I really understand what direction they are going in and how I will use that in teaching my children. This means that after the initial learning period as a teacher, this program is very open & go, but I didn't find that to be the case right out of the box.
We received both the
Primary Arts of Language: Reading($69) and the complementary
Primary Arts of Language: Writing ($89). Each of the sets contains a DVD-Rom with an introductory video given by Jill Pike, author of PAL. The DVD-Rom also contains all of the student materials in PDF form and various audio's with further teacher training. I spent time organizing the materials and then watching the video's. I do not recommend trying to begin using this program without watching those initial video's. Jill Pike does an excellent job walking you through each component of PAL, how it is used and how to introduce it to your child. After that I read through the Teacher's Manuals and started to gather our supplies and put together the Phonetic Games. I chose to put together all of the 35 games before we got started with the program. I am not very good at working on the fly and knew that if I didn't have things put together when we sat down for a lesson, then it probably wouldn't happen! You can see I re-purposed an old scrapbook file box for our PAL materials. The Class Journal, Games, Teacher's Manuals, Phonetic Farm Folder and printed student materials all fit in the box.
After all of the prep work we were ready to get started! The daily schedule doesn't vary a whole lot from day to day, so once we got into a rhythm, our learning time was predictable and Miss Paya was able to gather materials and take charge of some of her learning. I love that PAL encourages early independence in the student's learning.
There is a possible daily schedule printed in the Reading Teacher's Manual in the first lesson. I chose to keep to that schedule pretty closely. We would start by reading the poem "September", make an entry in our Class Journal, practice our printing from the PAL: Writing student materials and read a story. I would let Miss Paya take a break and play for a bit while I worked with her older siblings before we would sit back down and finish the lesson. We would work through "Foundations" - this is where she would learn new phonograms, play games using those phonograms or sight words, play the Card Game and then spend time playing the Phonetic Games by herself. We would also go on a tour through the Phonetic Farm, reviewing previously learned phonograms, read words from our index cards and then practice our phonograms through dictation. Generally the first portion of our lessons would take about 30-45 minutes (Little Bit would sit with us to read a story) and the second portion was about 20 or so. She would work through the games by herself while I worked close by, so I wasn't always needed for the entire lesson period. There were times that the time commitment would almost feel like too much in our school day, but after I started having Miss Paya's older siblings take over reading the story and playing the games with her, it freed me up to help someone else with their math or spelling. The double bonus to that set-up is that the older kids get built-in practice reading aloud and reinforcing their phonograms!
Primary Arts of Language holds to a different philosophy of teaching to read than I have used in the past. There were parts of it that I really liked and parts that I wished were a bit different. First, PAL teaches some sight words, but teaches the phonograms within the context of those sight words. I really liked that the phonograms were taught within the context of sight words, like "ow" in yellow or "ee" in green. However, I wish that it started with teaching the sounds of all the letters first, so that when Miss Paya was introduced to the "squealy ee's" in green, she would have recognized the /g/, /r/, /n/ sounds, too. I have mixed feelings about teaching sight words at all, but I do think that the way in which they are approached in PAL is about the most helpful of any other sight word program I have encountered.
I absolutely love the printing boxes used in the PAL: Writing portion to teach beginning handwriting. It was so much easier for Miss Paya to make correctly formed letters in a box than try to stay on a small line at first. She was so proud of herself when she would complete a few perfectly formed letters easily! The letter stories used to introduce each letter are funny and helped her remember how to form the letters. The method of handwriting instruction is my favorite, too, as it teaches a form of letters that makes reversals very difficult since the "d" is taught making the circle part first and "b" is taught making a line down first. The letters are also taught with a continuous stroke that makes cursive instruction later on much easier. I love that poetry memorization is built into the program and that there are printables of each of the poem's. I would make several copies and we would mark the words, underlining phonograms and marking vowels making them much easier to decode. I used them with Mr. Lego and Mr. Fix-It as well, so everyone was learning the same poem and learning to read them very well. PAL: Writing uses All About Spelling to teach beginning spelling skills, but we hadn't gotten far enough into the program to begin using that component. I do like the AAS teaches all of the phonograms up front, though, so I may go back and spend some time teaching those to Miss Paya and then continue with the analyzing and marking of the sight words in PAL:Reading.
Overall, I am very pleased with the content and instruction in PAL. For me the initial learning curve was a bit much, since it is just so different from any way of teaching reading that I have seen in the past. I do like the way the lessons are presented in the Teacher's Manual, but almost wish there weren't so many components to shuffle. I understand why the publisher chose to separate the Reading from the Writing component, but I would have much preferred having all of the lessons in one Teacher's Manual. The Phonetic Games are a perfect and fun way to solidify the skills being learned during the lessons and since many of them can be played independently or with a sibling, that made them even more appealing to Miss Paya. She has thrived on being able to take control of some of her own learning. She is eager to sit down to her lessons each day and now that I feel I have gotten my head around the direction the program is going, we will continue to use it to teach Miss Paya how to read!
To see what my Crewmates thought of their experience with Primary Arts of Language, click the link below!
**DISCLAIMER: Any products reviewed by me as a member of the Schoolhouse Review Crew have been given to me free of charge in order for me to provide you with an honest review of the product and/or how we used the product within our family. I do not receive any other form of compensation for the reviews posted on this blog.
