No, I don’t mean rhymes. The first thing I learned from this website is that Rimes are words that sound alike AND look alike (cat, at, bat, vat) the other thing I learned is that you don’t need a bookshelf full of leveled readers to help your child learn to read! At Rime To Read you purchase sets of leveled readers that teach reading using rimes instead of phonics. After I checked it out a little bit I let my friend use it. Her five year old is learning to read and she gave these books a shot. Her first response was that he seemed to be memorizing, not actually learning, but as time progressed she said that he was in fact learning quite a few of the words, but also simply memorizing some. She, like many others who try this program, decided to add these books as a supplement to a phonics program.
Her son especially loved this series for the novel aspect of it being like a computer game. He was allowed to sit on the computer, and even sit in daddy’s lap, while turning the pages himself and reading them out loud. Apparently they had an occasional problem of pages stalling, or spoken words not working correctly, but she still really enjoyed the site. she said the biggest issue with the page stalls was that it would frustrate him when he was reviewing my himself. They found past books very easy to get back to to review and reread.
While it is a computer program you can also print the books for go anywhere reading.
My biggest issue is that in order to read the pricing information you have to register and get one sample book free. You can’t simply see it and decide if it is in your budget or not. In the end I think the price is fair. You can buy 4 books at a time for $9.99 or pay $44.99 and get all 20 right away. That is more expensive than some phonics programs, but much cheaper then many series of leveled readers. All in all I think it is worth trying out, especially since you can read and try one book for free to see how your child likes it.
