Before receiving First Start Reading, I was not very familiar with Memoria Press. Memoria Press is a family-run publishing company, founded in 1998 by Cheryl Lowe and her son Brian in Louisville, Kentucky. Memoria Press is a simple, easy-to-use K-12 classical Christian curriculum for home and private schools.
For this review, we received the First Start Reading set which includes the Teacher's Guide and four Student Books A-D. This set has an affordable price of $42.95. You can purchase additional Student Book sets for $28.00.
First Start Reading is a Kindergarten level phonics program that teaches traditional phonics, vowel-consonant blending, printing, letter formation, and even correct pencil grip.
The Teacher's Guide is full of detailed explanations of how to teach each lesson, including helpful assessment and teaching tips. The teaching tips in the Teacher's Guide include a Phonics Overview, Phonics Approach, Phonics Recitation, General Teaching Guidelines, and more. Each lesson in the Teacher's Guide has a picture of the student book page and a complete teaching guide that tells you, word-for-word, what to say. Everett and I especially liked the ear training exercise with each lesson that introduced a new letter sound. Everett will now ask, at random times, what letter things start with.
Each Student Book teaches specific letter sounds, CVC words, reading skills, and sentences. The letters and letter sounds are not taught in Alphabetical Order. Each lesson is only two pages in length, starting with one letter and sound, then progressing to three to four letter words and then to three to six word sentences. The Student Books are printed in black and white, which I feel helps to eliminate some possible distractions. By the end of the lessons though, the Student Book will be full of color with your child's own artistic flair, as most of the lessons includes pictures to color and a place for your child to draw a picture of what they are learning.
I started Everett, who just turned 5 years old in March, with Lesson 1 in Student Book A. Because Everett is still pretty young, we did a lot of review of the letters and sounds after each lesson, it took us 4 or 5 days to complete two or three lessons each week. The first two lessons were the letters M and A, then by lesson 3 Everett read his first two-word sentence "I am". So far we have made it through the first 10 lessons of Student Book A. Everett seems to enjoy the lessons, although he does sometimes complain that the size of the letter printing is too small for him. We are still working on Everett holding the pencil correctly.
Everett and I have enjoyed the lessons in First Start Reading. This will definitely be a nice addition to our curricula to continue through the year. I am considering buying additional Student Books for Eli. Although Eli is 10 years old, he struggles with reading because of Dyslexia and I think the simple lessons in this program will make a great review for him during the summer.
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