Alpha Omega Publications: Horizons 2nd Grade Phonics & Reading Set {Schoolhouse Crew Review}

My daughter is entering second grade this Fall and is pretty excited about it. We have been doing a minimal amount school over the Summer and this helped me to see areas that need improvement in her studies. In doing this, I’ve noted that Phonics and Reading is an area that she should spend extra time on this year. She does have fairly good reading comprehension skills already but her confidence in reading aloud hasn’t been very strong. We were using a Phonics program which kept her interest at first but overtime it seemed to move along slowly and her eagerness to continue doing it was lost in the slow pace and over repetitiveness. In other words, she wasn’t being challenged enough and grew bored. We needed a new and better approach in this area.

In being a member of the Schoolhouse Crew Review team, I was given the privilege to review Horizons 2nd Grade Phonics & Reading Set. I previously was looking into buying this exact set for Fall and Winter school season. I have had a good experience with Alpha Omega Publications curriculum for the past few years and feel very much blessed to have been given this opportunity.

-About the Curriculum-

Horizons 2nd Grade Phonics & Reading Set is made up of two consumable student workbooks, two student readers, and a teacher’s guide. The themes covered throughout this curriculum are are penmanship, vocabulary, spelling, phonics, phonemic awareness, text comprehension and fluency. The curriculum follows a spiral method approach which means what’s being learned will be spread out over time instead of repeating nothing but the same concept over and over again lesson after lesson. This method works well with children that get bored of the repetitiveness often found in mastery approaches to learning. A spiral approach allows some but not all children to concentrate better when what’s being learned is brought up again at a later time.

Between the two student workbooks, the curriculum has 160 lessons which are two pages each in the length. The lessons feature brightly colored illustrations and many different types of fun exercises. Exercises vary from fill-in-the-blanks, word searches, writing, letter/sound recognition, match the picture to the word, and so onto that instill the phonemic rules introduced and reviewed are remembered. Vocabulary, spelling, alphabetizing, rhyming, sentence structure, and so on will be strengthened as the lessons progress forward. The pace is fast but the amount of work for each lesson isn’t overwhelming.

The student reader books are paired together with the lessons. These books feature classic stories and poems to be read aloud. A few of the stories are short and others longer such as the story of Robinson Crusoe and a Little Princess. The stories have good lessons to be learned often pertaining to personal character development. There’s nothing objectionable in the text. At the top of each of the pages, there is a title pointing to what lesson it goes along with. The rules learned in the lessons correspond and tie in with the story or poem to be read. Exercises in the workbooks sometimes correspond with what is read in the readers.

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