I’m Kris, homeschool mom of 8. My daughter Erin, almost 5, has Down syndrome. She is a visual learning, which led me to BrillKids. I’m hoping this program will be good for her. I’ll also use it for my typical 2 year old, since he’ll be right next to her regardless. Might as well get two kids reading, huh? I have taught all of my other children to read using phonics, so this is new for me. I think the site is set up very well. Once I got going, it wasn’t too confusing, although I have a lot to learn here. Not sure where to start, other than the lessons. What about flashcards? Do you all do those in addition to the lessons?
Hi Erin’s Mom,
Welcome! The program introduce pattern phonics (which includes word families and such) at about 1 month into the curriculum. So, you’ll still have an opportunity to teach phonics. You can print out everything onto cardstock if you prefer using the Print function in LR, or you can just use it on the screen. Also, from the LR library above, you can download additional phonics files if that is your preference for teaching, the animal alphabet phonics file is really cute. And as long as you’re downloading files, check out the Musical Instruments file by Cyndec, it’s one of my kids’ favorites!
You can take a few different approaches. You can choose to play the daily lessons or just play separate categories from the advanced play/edit option. With my kids, in the beginning I chose to show the daily lessons and then supplemented with printing out 2 categories per week. I put them in the BrillKids flap binders and just set them out for them to use at will. They loved it and typically mastered them by the end of the week. I would reload it with new words every Sunday. You can also purchase the 8 core categories pre-printed from the green STORE tab above if you want to take this approach but minimize printing (which is how I started). I think they might be listed under “other teaching materials” or something like that. Sometimes my kids just liked to “touch the words” which is what prompted me to do the print outs until they were able to decode.
Best of luck & welcome!