Farm Fresh Adventures: 200 Essential Reading Skills for Fifth Grade by Reading Eggs {Product Review}

Last September, we were able to review the 200 Essential Reading Skills for Third Grade from Reading Eggs. My son's skills have boosted significantly over the last year, and when we had the chance to review the workbooks again, we chose to go up to the 200 Essential Reading Skills for Fifth Grade to match the work that he's been doing on the online Reading Eggs program. The program provides short lessons to review and provide mastery of the common skills of reading. Today I'd like to share with you my review and why this program will be a part of our 2019-2020 curriculum for my nine-year-old. You also will be able to snag free 4 weeks of the online program for your family!

About the Product

200 Essential Reading Skills for Fifth Grade is based on the multi-award winning reading program
Reading Eggs (and Reading Eggspress) (geared for grades 2-5). With 200 pages of assignments based on comprehension, spelling, and grammar, it’s like getting three books in one! This is a comprehensive 36-week curriculum geared to build the key skills students need to succeed in reading. When combined with the online Reading Eggspress (just upper level Reading Eggs lessons), this program is an incredibly strong boost to language skills! In fact, with Reading Eggspress, your student can improve reading skills in just 15 minutes a day!

This rigorous 36-week program has an easy-to-navigate format targeting essential skills. Each week’s lessons are spread out over five days with a balance in comprehension, spelling, and grammar.

The five days are laid out as follows--

Day 1: Comprehension Lesson
The student reads a text and adds annotations to it to help them answer sets of multiple-choice questions about the text.

Day 2: Comprehension Lesson
The student has a deeper practice of the strategy they learned on day 1 and now work on short-answer questions, requiring close reading and understanding of the text. Both day 1 and day 2 are taken from the same book—which can actually be found and read in completion online in the Reading Eggspress library. The comprehension questions help build their literal and inferential skills.

Day 3: Spelling Lesson
The lesson introduces a rule or spelling pattern and then using a core list of 20 words, the student completes activities consisting of word sorts, syllable counting, phonics, meaning, and word building—all geared to help them learn how to spell words.

Day 4: Spelling Lesson
This lesson helps build proof-reading skills using the words from day 3. The student is also given 10 additional, more difficult words following the same rule or generalization from day 3. Vocabulary is extended as the challenge words are used in passages and definition activities.

Day 5: Grammar Lesson
Each lesson defines and explains a grammatical term simply, with examples. The lesson then includes activities to practice what was learned.

Additionally, the program includes a comprehensive review every 9 weeks to reinforce learning. This assists in finding strengths, identifying areas for further development, and rewards progress. Altogether, there are about 40 weeks of work if you spaced out the reviews over an entire week.

Our Thoughts on the Product

One of the first things that I did was log into my son's account on Reading Eggspress to see which map started the 5th-grade work. The workbooks exactly coordinate with each of the maps. There are 40 maps which each coordinate to a week of lessons--remember that there are 36 weeks of curriculum in the workbooks with 4 additional review weeks. Thus one map on the online course matches a week in the workbook.

Each map features five lessons, thus your student can work one lesson online with one page of the workbook. If you use this method your student can get a very balanced reading curriculum with extra vocabulary and spelling practice.

We aren't quite completed with our 4th grade level on Reading Eggspress, but we are close enough that I opted the 5th-grade level one was the best choice. Because I really wanted to hopefully use the workbook next year, we started at the beginning. I have had him work on 1 page each day that we work on Reading Eggs that last few weeks. We're on summer break still, so we are only doing 2-3 days a week of work. We've done 2-3 pages a week.

Some of the online Lessons take 2 days

Reviewing vowel exceptions

Some of the things he's worked on thus far:

Compare and contrast
Vowel Exceptions
Types of Nouns
Analyzing Character Actions
Spelling endings: rse, rce
Demonstrative Pronouns
Endings: ent, ant
Commas in places and dates
Sequencing Events
Endings: and, end, ond
Verb Phrases
and more...

I appreciate the year planner so that I can get an idea of what will be covered over the weeks.

Another benefit is that the answer key is in the back for the whole workbook. The TOC pages lay out the skills that are practiced for each week, and show you where the reviews fit in.

I do like the reviews which occur every nine weeks. The reviews consist of three parts--spelling, grammar, and comprehension--reviewing the concepts that were covered in the previous 9 weeks of lessons.

So do I recommend this workbook? 100% yes!

Whether you use it with the online version of Reading Eggs or by itself, it is a great supplement program for strengthening reading skills. Adding it onto the online program you have a complete reading curriculum for sure, with a bunch of extras. It is because of this that we will be using the workbook paired with the online program for my son's reading curriculum this coming year of school! He enjoys the online lessons and appreciates that the workbook pages are short and easy to complete independently. I've looked at a lot of other reading programs, but this one is the one he enjoys the most--so why change?!

Have you tried Reading Eggs yet? Just in time for Back-To-School, I have a free trial for FOUR WEEKS of Reading Eggs! The online program is geared for ages 2-13 and incorporates engaging lessons, games, and e-books!

🌟Claim Now🌟

Finally, I also want to mention that Reading Eggs also has a new Mathseeds program for ages 3-9 and they have recently introduced their 200 Essential Math Skills workbooks for grades K-2! So make sure you check those out if you are looking for an engaging math curriculum.

Want To Know More?

We've been working through the 200 Essential Reading Skills for Fifth Grade workbook from Reading Eggs with our online subscription. I encourage you to visit other crew members to see what the other workbooks look like-- especially the newer 200 Essential Math Skills ones!