Publisher: A Beka Books
Developed by Pensacola Christian College
To order, call (800) 874-2352

This product is included on our Phonics Products for Home and Phonics Products for School lists.

A Beka Reading begins teaching intensive, systematic phonics in pre-kindergarten. Many students learn to read at age 4, before they ever start "real school." The material is reinforced in kindergarten, first, and second grades. One important feature of the A Beka Reading program is that no matter when a student begins—kindergarten, first, or second grade—he still receives a complete phonics course in a single year. This is critical for transfer students, who usually come from school districts that don't teach phonics. In a few months, most children receiving A Beka reading instruction are reading independently—no matter what their age.

The A Beka Reading program includes well-designed phonics wall charts and flashcards for classroom teaching and a phonics handbook, workbook, and set of readers for each child. The A Beka Reading program is impressively correlated with the A Beka Language program, which teaches grammar, spelling, handwriting, composition, and vocabulary. Here's how it works: after the children learn short-vowel sounds, they read a story with short-vowel sounds. The next week, their spelling words consist of short-vowel words. Unlike many spelling programs, A Beka spelling contains spelling words that reinforce the phonics lessons learned so far. In their language workbook, students learn to punctuate short-vowel sentences, while in handwriting they practice writing short vowels.

Together A Beka Reading and A Beka Language form the complete A Beka language arts curriculum, one of the best-designed curriculums available. You can't go wrong buying the complete curriculum, whether for classroom or home-school use.

In the fall of 1997, second graders at a Loudoun County, Virginia private school, who had been instructed with a well-known whole language program during first grade, were tested with the National Right to Read Foundation's Reading Competency Test. Results showed only three students in the entire class had mastered the basic letter/sound relationships. And those three students had received extensive phonics instruction from their parents. As a result of this startling finding, the principal took immediate action and switched to the complete A Beka language arts curriculum. After just two weeks of this research-based instruction, the teacher said, "They’re finally getting it!"

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