We received
Foundations Level A to use with Eli (8) who is struggling with learning to read. Foundations is a complete reading, phonics, spelling, & handwriting curriculum.
We received the hard cover Teacher's Manual ($34.20), the Student Manuscript workbook ($16.20), a whiteboard ($10.80), Handwriting Tactile Cards ($25.20), Phonogram Flash Cards ($16.20), Rhythm of Handwriting Quick Reference ($9.00), Phonogram Game Cards ($9.00), & the
Phonograms iPad app ($2.99) for the purpose of this review.
Truthfully, at first glance this all seemed a little overwhelming to me. But reading through the Teacher's Manual showed me that each lesson is laid out step-by-step, with clear instructions, materials list, teacher tips, book lists, and more to guide you through.
So then Eli & I looked through the Student workbook together. A common "problem" that we run into with reading programs, since Eli is 8 years old and struggling with reading, is that the majority of programs that we have experienced are geared towards younger students (4-7), meaning that all of the images and stories are (as Eli says) "too baby-like". Foundations A is a little different though from other programs, while the workbook uses cartoon images, most of the readers use "real" images. Eli liked that :)
We worked through the first few lessons of handwriting & phonemic awareness fairly quick...we giggled through learning about the shape of our mouth when using letter sounds in lesson 1. Eli struggles with handwriting to keep the letters in the lines so he really liked that the whiteboard has two different sized lines for writing & prefers the larger side. I liked the fact that this program isn't strictly book work, as that is very frustrating for Eli. Each lesson has different "hands-on" activities for learning...big "bonus" for us!!
Once we got to lesson 5 though, we had to skip over some of it because it requires the book Doodling Dragons: An ABC Book of Sounds, we did not receive this book for the review.
Eli's favorite part of this program is the iPad app ($2.99). Which of course is no surprise to me, he will do most any type of school work on the iPad without complaints. You can add multiple players to the app to keep track of their progress.
There is the "game" part of the app that takes you through the sounds of the letters. Eli struggles with remembering the sounds of letters so this has been a great help for him over the last couple of weeks retaining the sounds of the letters. Most of the other phonics apps that we have tried are for very young children but Logic of English is not...Eli says..."sweet!"
Since we do not have all of the components to this curriculum, we won't continue to use it with Eli this year, however I am definitely going to keep it in mind for Everett next year!
Truthfully, at first glance this all seemed a little overwhelming to me. But reading through the Teacher's Manual showed me that each lesson is laid out step-by-step, with clear instructions, materials list, teacher tips, book lists, and more to guide you through.
Eli's favorite part of this program is the iPad app ($2.99). Which of course is no surprise to me, he will do most any type of school work on the iPad without complaints. You can add multiple players to the app to keep track of their progress. 
