Well, this is exciting! I had mentioned before that, as we reached the end of our Bob Books sets, I was going to transition to the Treadwell Primer Reader. This, my friends, is the first lesson!

Daughter A. was so happy to read something fresh and new, and I was happy to have found something that actually qualifies as good, quality literature.

Here are a couple things you need to know about these lessons:

• The label I’ll be using is “TP” meaning that, for instance, the first story will be labeled “TP:1”–and so on and so forth for each new story. I hope this makes the lessons as easy to find as the Bob Books lessons are.
• I do not require my student to read these stories twice. These old-fashioned stories teach reading through a sort of natural repetition. For instance, in the story of The Little Red Hen, the hen goes to different animals and says variations of the same sentences over and over. That is enough repetition by the end of the story, in my opinion!
• The page numbers are for this specific printing of the Primer. If you have a copy that is not published by Yesterday’s Classics, there is a chance that the lessons will not match up exactly. That doesn’t make them unusable, but you will need to prepare in advance.
• Don’t stop reading the Bob Books! (And, yes, I know that I haven’t posted all of the lessons for all of the Bob Books yet.) I leave the ones we’ve already read out in a plastic shoe box, so that she can pick them up and practice reading them over and over. This was good review over the summer; I didn’t really need to do any review at all because she read the Bob Books so regularly.

Lesson One

• Introduce new digraph: ea
• Review appropriate sections in the binder.
• Read: Treadwell Primer, Story 1 (“The Little Red Hen”) pp. 2-7

Click here for tips on teaching the vowel digraph ea.

Lesson Two

• Review appropriate sections in the binder.
• Read: Treadwell Primer, Story 1 (“The Little Red Hen”) pp. 8-ff