All About Reading is a fun and engaging program that starts with essential pre-reading skills and continues on to teach all five key components of reading. It contains everything your student needs to become a fluent reader for life.

Multisensory approach makes it easy for kids to understand.

This mastery-based building block program works with kids who have learning disabilities as well as those who do not.

Prep Time: Minimal

Teachers Manual: Essential

Technology: Free apps for letter and phonogram recognition

Institute for Excellence in Writing offers the blended sound-sight approach to teaching your child to read. By combining phonics with some sight words, your child can begin to read quickly and with ease while building a solid foundation for the future. Games, activities, and stickers add interest for the child.

Prep Time: Moderate to high

Teachers Manual: Essential

Technology: DVDs and digital files

The Logic of English Essentials course was written for students ages seven and up who need a structured, integrated program for learning reading, spelling, and handwriting. It can be used following either the course by the same author, or another introductory phonics program.
Not comprehensive.

Prep Time: Moderate to low

Teachers Manual: Essential

Technology: Optional free video training

Heggerty Primary covers phonetic awareness. Designed to supplement your existing literacy curriculum, the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Primary lessons easily integrate into 1st and 2nd-grade classrooms. When lessons are taught consistently each day teachers see improvement in students’ reading, spelling, and writing, as the students learn to hear the sounds in words.
K-2, only covers phonetic awareness.

Institute for Excellence in Writing is an overall approach to writing instruction for years to come, a product that will make you a good writing coach and improve your own writing skills along the way. It provides a general outline that will guide you in teaching composition at all levels, but leaves the specifics up to you. This program is available in DVD format or online. The online version is taught by a certified teacher, with writing feedback.

Prep Time: DVD format: heavy parent prep;/ Online format: minimal parent prep

Teachers Manual: DVD format: Essential/ Online: none, but parent tracking needed

Technology: DVDs or Online

Grade K-10

The Brave Writer Language Arts programs are monthly digital products that feature copywork and dictation passages form a specific read aloud novel. These pieces of the Brave Writer suite include instruction in punctuation and literary style, with some focus on spelling and grammar.

- The Wand K-1st - A Quiver of Arrows 1st-2nd - The Arrow 3rd-6th

Prep Time: Low

Teachers Manual: The Writer’s Jungle is core book for parents

Technology: Digital downloads monthly

Grade K-3

WriteShop Primary is a parent-guided writing curriculum with daily, easy-to-implement activities..

It introduces beginning writing skills to your 5-8 year old student through games, crafts, picture books, and one-on-one teaching time.

Simplify Writing provides engaging resources and differentiation materials that help fill in learning gaps and empower their students to share their opinions and ideas. Each lesson takes about 10-15 minutes and keeps students engaged and active in the learning experience.  Utilizes a library of grammar tools in the context of student writing to better develop the written language skills of students. Provides the flexibility teachers need to reach students with varying experiences, background knowledge, and ability levels.
Starts at grade 2. Teacher/Personal license for $247, one-time purchase

Grade 2

Write Away helps your second graders improve their writing, reading, learning, and test taking. This colorful, encouraging book guides students to write better sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Students practice informative and persuasive forms as well as narrative and creative ones.  

Grade 3

Write On Track is a writing handbook that helps students in grade 3 become better writers, readers, test takers, and learners. Write on Track uses colorful art and an encouraging voice to lead students step-by-step through the writing process. They learn to write better sentences and paragraphs, building essays in many modes: narrative, explanatory, persuasive, research, creative, and assessment.  

Grades 4-5

Writer Express includes writing guidelines, models, checklists, and much more. Writers Express also helps your students become better readers, test takers, and learners.  

Grade K-8

BookShark is a complete, literature-based, homeschool curriculum developed for Pre-K to Eighth Grade students. This curriculum uses a variety of educational resources including literary fiction and nonfiction, biographies, illustrations and hands-on experiments to deliver an engaging and complete educa-tion that extends beyond textbook memorization.

BookShark combines a proprietary History, Science and Language Arts .

Prep Time: Low

Teachers Manual: Essential

Grade K-8

Moving Beyond the Page offers a strong language arts program that covers vocabulary, writing, story elements, and figurative language while helping to develop a love of literature.

Prep Time: Moderate to high

Teachers Manual: None. Instructions for lessons in student book

Technology: Online or DVD video

Grade K-5

Designed to provide parents with a curriculum that focuses on the development of the whole child, Blossom and Root is a creative, flexible, hands-on curriculum for secular homeschooling families with a focus on nature, literature, STEM, and art. Features:
- Innovative art curriculum, integrating math concepts, picture study, and weekly art projects that stimulate the imagination and encourage creativity; lively, adventure-filled science curriculum and coordinating nature study curriculum focusing on geology, weather, and seasons, and a student notebook for science and a nature notebook to document your adventures. Also includes six special edition Profiles in Science Book Seed issues.
- A living-books inspired language arts program full of fairytales, folktales, and nature stories. Includes engaging literature projects, journaling, word building, mini-poem activities, narration, and copywork. This curriculum also integrates geography and culture as you explore the countries of origin for over a dozen world folktales. Includes student notebook
- Complete parent curriculum guides (includes detailed schedules, lessons, book and supply lists, budget-friendly tips for curriculum implementation, and more)

Grade 1-4

Language Smarts books can be used as textbooks or comprehensive workbooks with your textbooks to teach reading, writing, grammar, and punctuation skills.  Each book also develops critical thinking, vocabulary, and several other skills and concepts normally taught in the next grade. Engaging lessons include easy-to-follow explanations, examples, and charts for visual learners. Each lesson is followed by a variety of fun, colorful, mind-building activities that use different genres.

Prep Time: None

Teachers Manual: None. Instructions for lessons in student book

Grade 3-12

With Reading Detective, students read and analyze short literature passages and stories that include fiction and nonfiction genres. Then they answer multiple-choice and short-response questions, citing sentence evidence to support their answers.

Prep Time: None

Teachers Manual: Answer key in the back of print copy

Technology: Available in software format

Grade K-5

Explode the Code is based on the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading, which supports multisensory, structured, sequential, cumulative, and flexible instruction. This curriculum offers a complete systematic phonics program for the elementary grades. It includes many activities which offer a variety of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic options, and specific lesson plans for ELL students with a focus on vocabulary, grammar, reading, and comprehension. Explode The Code half books 1 ½ – 6 ½ provide extra practice, enabling students to read words, phrases, sentences, and stories independently. 

Grade 1-5

Read Live provides complete access to Read Naturally Live, Word Warm-ups Live, One Minute Reader Live, and Read Naturally Live—Español in a simple and effective format. Build fluency, develop phonics skills, and improve vocabulary and comprehension with a structured process featuring nonfiction passages and an engaging scoring system. 

Grade 1-8

Spelling Workout will build your child's spelling foundation. Using principles of phonics, this step-by-step program will introduce your child to the basic building blocks of the written word. Spelling Workout uses cross-curricular reading selections sure to keep your child interested in the material.

Prep Time: None

Teachers Manual: Has answers overprinted on reduced student pages

Technology: None

Grade 1-12

All About Spelling (AAS) is an incremental spelling program based on the intensive phonics approach of the Orton-Gillingham methodology. It uses multi-sensory activities that should work well with most learners.

Each lesson focuses on a single concept, such as a particular phonogram or spelling rule, and includes a spelling word list that reinforces that concept.

Prep Time: Minimal

Teachers Manual: Essential

Grade 3-8

Looking for a new approach to spelling? The Phonetic Zoo is a phonics-based program which uses auditory input to ensure that the correct spelling of each word is absorbed by the brain. The audio allows students to work independently much of the time, while allowing for the repetition needed for mastery. The audio portion of the program can be purchased as CDs or as an MP3 download.

Prep Time: Minimal

Teachers Manual: None, but some parent/teacher instruction required

Technology: Audio CD

Grade 2-5

Spellwell is a flexible spelling series from the author of Explode The Code® which teaches grade-level words that follow a particular pattern, as well as words that are chosen by the individual student. It makes an organized, effective spelling program in just thirty minutes of class time per week a reality. Each book is suitable for half a school year.

Prep Time: None

Teachers Manual: Useful

Technology: None

Grade 4-7

Spectrum Language Arts For more than 20 years, Spectrum has provided solutions for parents who want to help their children get ahead, and for teachers who want their students to meet and exceed set learning goals—providing workbooks that are a great resource for both homeschooling and classroom curriculum.  The books include fun activities that incorporate language arts into everyday settings to help inspire learning into your child’s homeschool or classroom curriculum. Lesson reviews test student knowledge before moving on to new and exciting lessons. An answer key is included in the back of the second grade book to track your child’s progress and accuracy. 

Grade 4-7

Sonlight created Grammar Ace, a supplemental, intensive grammar program with three components: the instructor’s manual, the student workbook, and the Schoolhouse Rock DVD. It includes multisensory learning experiences through games and activities

Prep Time: Low to Moderate

Teachers Manual: Essential

Technology: DVD

Grade 2-12

Daily Grams are marvelous tools for re-viewing and practicing grammar skills without boring students with an entire grammar course year after year. These books assume that students have already been instructed in the relevant grammar concepts and simply provide reinforcement and practice without instruction. Each grade-level book becomes progressively more difficult reflecting what is assumed to have been taught in previous Easy Grammar books.

Prep Time: None

Teachers Manual: Essential as answer keys

Technology: None

Grade 4-7

With The Language Mechanic, lessons begin with a "grabber"–a humorous miscommunication that results when a rule is broken. These examples are followed by an explanation of the specific rule, the logic behind it, and guided and independent practice. This book includes presentation and reinforcement suggestions, answers, a glossary, and a compare/contrast organizer. ear and easy-to-follow activities; and additional 'Next Step' follow-up and enrichment activities.

Prep Time: None

Teachers Manual: None

Grade 3-12

Word Roots teaches students the meanings of Latin and Greek prefixes, roots, and suffixes commonly used in English. Learning word elements dramatically improves spelling and the ability to decode unfamiliar words. Word Roots will add hundreds of words to your students’ vocabulary and greater depth to their thinking and writing.

Prep Time: None

Teachers Manual: N/A

Technology: Software versions available

Grade 2-12

Wordly Wise is a very thorough program covering a wide range of skills.

In this series, students use one list of words through four or five different types of exercises to become familiar with the word’s usage in different contexts as well as its various meanings. Exercises include definitions, recognition of proper usage, word origins, prefixes and suffixes, analogies, and synonym substitution. Crossword puzzles at the end of each unit reinforce learning from earlier lessons. Children must truly understand meanings to complete the activities.

Prep Time: None

Teachers Manual: Answer Key only

Technology: None

Grade 1-12

Sadlier Vocabulary Workshop is a vocabulary development program which explicitly teaches vocabulary in context with high-quality science, social studies, and literary texts. It includes a variety of strategies for acquiring new vocabulary and understanding word relationships, figurative language, and nuances in word meanings.

Prep Time: Minimal to none

Teachers Manual: Recommended

Technology: Online component with audio passages, games, quizzes and worksheets

Grade K-5

Handwriting Without Tears aims to make legible and fluent handwriting a skill that students can master easily. It uses multi-sensory learning methods, is very child-friendly, and provides a teacher’s guide and student work-book for each level.

Prep Time: Minimal

Teachers Manual: Recommended

Technology: None

Grade K-6

Daily Handwriting Practice provides 36 weeks of daily practice. Writing words and sentences on a daily basis allows a child’s letter formation and spacing to gradually improve. Choose from Traditional Manuscript, Traditional Cursive, Modern Manuscript, and Contemporary Cursive.

Prep Time: None

Teachers Manual: None

Technology: None

Typing Tutor-online offers free online typing exercises with instructional videos.

Prep Time: None

Technology: Online

Keyboarding Without Tears makes it easy to teach the foundation skills students need to succeed with today’s classroom work and online testing.

Builds touch typing fluency and speed. Includes general computer readiness and digital citizenship skills, too! Web-based, compatible with PC/Mac computers, Chromebooks, iPads, and tablets.

Prep Time: None

Technology: Online

Learn touch typing online using Typing Club’s free courses, including 650 typing games, tests and videos.

Prep Time: None

Technology: Online lessons

Typing.com features real-time progress tracking, custom lessons, times tests, and interactive learning.

Prep Time: None

Technology: Online lessons