Take Reading Skills to New Heights with Workbooks from Reading Eggs {Curriculum Review}

My #1 recommended reading resource for elementary aged children is Reading Eggs. This online reading program well deserves their multiple awards and it's hard to think that you could improve on the program--until I discovered the 200 Essential Reading Skills workbooks created by Reading Eggs to expand their reading curriculum. For the last several weeks, we have been reviewing 200 Essential Reading Skills for Third Grade, a 36-week comprehensive curriculum and I'm eager to share my review with you.
About the Product
200 Essential Reading Skills for Third Grade is based on the multi-award winning reading program 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 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 the comprehension, spelling, and grammar. 
The five days are laid out as follows--
Day 1: Comprehension Lesson The student reads a text and add 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 a 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.
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.

My Thoughts on the Book

I was thrilled to receive this book, especially when I learned that it coordinated with what we were already doing in Reading Eggspress Third Grade. I immediately started looking through the book to see what was all inside. Included in the front of the book is a breakdown of the entire 36-week lesson schedule, showing what is being studied on each day during the 5 day week.  Additionally, there are pages which lay out a year planner of what my son will be learning in comprehension, spelling, and grammar. This is very useful when planning out the year and finding additional activities to go with what is being learned. 

As I have said, these workbooks coincide with the online Reading Eggs program. Books K-1 work with the Reading Eggs program, while books 2-5 match up with the Reading Eggspress program. So how does it match up? We are doing book 3. This book matches up exactly with the Reading Eggspress third grade lessons. I looked to see how they matched and one lesson on the online Reading Eggspress, matches one week’s lessons in the workbook. Thus, the final online lesson for third grade, matches the final week’s lessons for the workbook. They go hand in hand. Also remember that there are four reviews worked in the 36-week curriculum, just as there are reviews at the end of each "map" online.
Now, some of you may already know there are FREE downloadable worksheets online that coordinate with each lesson online. I’m sure you were like me and wondered how those were different than the workbook. Here is how—the two page worksheet online that is available for free matches day 1 and 2 of the workbook. That’s it. There are still the two spelling lessons and grammar page that go with the week’s lesson. So you only get a portion of the curriculum. 
If you take into consideration there are 39 lessons online for third grade—and each of those has 2 worksheets, you end up printing off 78 pages. That’s a lot of ink and paper. And you still don’t get what is available in the workbook! It ends up being a far better price to just buy the workbook for $19.95—for you not only have the pages already printed for you (in color!), but you have THREE MORE DAYS worth of work AND the reviews AND the answer keys. Do the math. I did. 
So next comes the question—is this complete? We’ve been doing Reading Eggs/Reading Eggspress online for awhile, and it is amazing how extensive and excellent it is by itself. But when you throw in the addition of this workbook, I truly believe that you get a complete reading curriculum for your child. And let’s not forget both of these have spelling and grammar! That’s more of a complete LANGUAGE ARTS program. 
My son has always enjoyed doing Reading Eggspress, and he finds the workbook easy to finish in a short period of time. Now, he’s already worked to Lesson 29 (what is called lesson 90 in the grade level) on the online Reading Eggspress—that coordinates with week 27 in the book. I don’t know if I will just jump ahead so that they match, or if I will work our way through the workbook. I PROBABLY will just jump ahead and see how he does. I like the idea of them talking about the same stuff at the same time for reinforcing the skills. I do know, that when we finish third grade level for the book AND the online program, I will go ahead and order book 4 to match up with the 4th grade level online—it really makes it ideal for me to use as a parent. Having strong reading skills is important to me—and I believe that this 200 Essential Reading Skills series provides that—especially when combined with the online element of Reading Eggspress.  Here are some photos from later in the workbook:

One of the Comprehension Lessons

One of the Spelling Lessons

Another Spelling Lesson Sample

Review 4

If you are interested in adding the workbook to your use of Reading Eggs online--or if you simply want to use the workbook as a curriculum by itself, you can purchase the workbook you need here. But MAKE SURE you add in the special code that I have, which will give you an additional 10% off! use the code: WK10KBQ1G3K 
Haven't tried out Reading Eggs yet? You can get FOUR free weeks of Reading Eggs to try! Click the image below to get started!

In summary, I highly recommend both the online program AND the workbooks--they can easily be used alone, but together they make an amazing reading program that would be very hard to beat! 

Want to Know More About the Product?

We have been reviewing the 200 Essential Reading Skills for Third Grade workbook from Reading Eggs. It has been a thumbs up experience and I encourage you to look at some of the other grade level workbooks my fellow crew members used. 

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