We were recently given the opportunity to review the Scaredy Cat Reading System Level 2 by Joyce Herzog.
Level 2 is appropriate for any child who has already mastered the basic letter sounds.
Cost: $75.00
The Scaredy Cat Reading System includes:
Teacher's Manual
Audio Lessons CD
Student Activity Book
Sentence Building Cards
Letter & Picture Magnets
Multi-Use Bingo Game
Two 11x7 Games
Six 8.5x11 Games
Alphabet, Picture, and Word Cards
A Reader
The Story of Letter Master
With the arrival of the Scaredy Cat Reading System, I was a less than enthused at the amount of prep time and cutting out the materials that is involved for this program. Having multiple children, at multiple ages & learning levels...there just isn't much time for lots of prep work. The Teacher's Manual was a little overwhelming at first and took several days to read through before I was mostly confident in starting the program with Eli.
I was slightly disappointed in the quality of the materials, as it had the appearance of being printed at home, most of the materials were printed on regular colored cardstock, and there were several typos. For us, $75 is a fairly big chunk of our homeschool budget, so I would expect a better quality for that price. To justify spending that amount of money on a program would mean that the program would need to survive at least two kids....simple cardstock would not survive unless I spent the extra time and money on laminating everything. Perhaps, to bring the overall cost of the program down, I would suggest to have the games and cards on a printable cd, instead of already printed. That way each person could print off what they need, when they need it.
This program did not work for us. Perhaps Eli could sense my lack of enthusiasm when we started but he just was not interested in using it at all. Eli is very sight-oriented and an extreme visual learner, so "Phonics" frustrates him. He has learned most of the words that he can read by sight alone. The audio cd lessons would not hold his attention and he didn't care for the tone of voice. We attempted several different times over the past few weeks to use this program but he was just not interested.
