Little Reader by BrillKids

I had never considered trying to teach my babies how to read, but recently I had the opportunity to try a program geared toward that goal. Brill Kids Little Reader program is one system for teaching young children how to read.

“The Little Reader software curriculum will guide your child in a systematic and progressive fashion over a 12-month period from sight-reading single words, to sounding out groups of words, to reading complete stories. During that time, your child will see over 3,000 words in more than 140 subject categories”

These are the components of the Little Reader software curriculum:

The Flash Lesson:
Flash lessons in Little Reader are either Word Flash or Picture Flash – that is, they involve either words or pictures. The pronunciation of the word is played at the moment the word or picture is flashed.

The Multisensory Lesson:
During a multisensory lesson, your child will see a word followed by a picture illustrating the word’s meaning. At this point you and your child should also take time to do the action that is shown and say the word.

The Phonics Lesson:
This component is introduced in the second half of the curriculum. It does not teach children letter names but rather Pattern Phonics™ which introduces your child to the relationships between letters and sounds in a gradual, progressive manner.

The Stories:
Little Reader lessons guide your child from reading single words to couplets, phrases, sentences, and finally culiminating in stories, where your child will see familiar words in the context of complete stories.

This program is created to use two times a day during the weekday. Each lesson takes anywhere from 3 -10 minutes depending on how many of the modules you want to go through. If used for a year and then reinforced, the creators state that your child should be reading by age 3.

What I thought:
I used this program with my 2yr. old and my 3yr. old. Both my daughters enjoyed watching, saying and acting the words. I did have a hard time implementing the program two times a day though, and we were doing good if we hit it several times a week. I don’t feel like I’ve had the program long enough to say whether or not it has helped my girls with learning how to read. The program did fill a  void in our day when I needed to keep the little ones occupied with a non-messy learning activity. I thought that it did help with some vocabulary development with my 2yr. old, and I liked the access to free downloads. There are printable stimulation cards and flash cards, powerpoint presentations, e-book stories and alphabet tracing pages. For me, I still believe that it is so important to not depend on only a program to develop good readers. There still needs to be lots of snuggle time on the couch reading real books together with our children.

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Disclosure: I was given this product for review purposes only. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.