Books! Glorious books! If you know me at all, or know my blog at all, then you know that I am all for books and reading and getting lost in the stories and adventures and romance. From Anne of Green Gables to Ingleside and beyond; from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to the Deathly Hallows; these are a few of the series that I love and will read many times over. Add in Jane Austin, and various contemporary authors that I follow and read each book, and you’ll understand how I’m expecting to read more books this year than last (I read 195 books in 2023). Needless to say, I think learning to read (and enjoying it!) is one of the best and most important skills to impart to my children.

Enter Reading Better Together by Sarah Miller, the former educator and homeschool mom behind the Homeschooling4Him website and blog. I discovered Sarah soon after I started homeschooling. She was participating with a group of bloggers that shared freebies, deals, and tips each month. I think I downloaded one of her freebies and ended up on her mailing list. She had a free webinar about learning to read and shared her Reading Better Together program. I didn’t think my daughter was ready yet, but so much of what Sarah said made sense and encompassed how I wanted to eventually teach my kids. Her program was phonics-based instead of whole word, and kids were starting to read as early as the first week using her side-by-side stories. I shared everything I learned with my husband and he encouraged me to trust my judgment, so I purchased the program.

Reviewing Reading Better Together

Learning to read can come naturally to kids or it can take some work. My daughter is excited to learn, but I think her articulation issues have caused it to take work. Of course, we started using this program at the age of 4 when kids usually learn to read at age 3-7, so she may not have been ready yet. Reading Better Together comes with many extras in addition to the reading program, including a video to help you determine if your child is ready to learn to read (I may not have paid enough attention to this one…). There are also videos to help with blending, teaching letter names and sounds, and even on choosing books that make your kids want to read.

Once you move to the actual reading curriculum, the program is 32 weeks and it is broken down into 4-week groupings of lessons and stories. Yes, stories. As noted earlier, this program comes with side-by-side stories to read with your children. Here are several examples of sentences in these stories (italics indicate what the adult reads, bold indicates what the child reads):

• Week 2: “Snake says, s.” “Lion sat on the cake!”
• Week 6: “Jim is a big pig.” “I am a cat.”
• Week 30: “‘My boat can float!’ boasts Joan. It is time to come home. She drags her boat up the road.”

True – it may not be learning to read in 100 lessons, but the learning progression is amazing to see and it feels like a good pace to teach and learn.

Is It Really “Together”?

One of the fun things about the Reading Better Together Program is that it is “together” in multiple ways. Your child is reading together with you, and you are teaching your child to read together with other families. The RBT program includes access to a community and Sarah usually hosts an event/webinar each month that she shares with the community. Currently, I don’t think the community is very active, but that’s mostly based on the membership. If someone asks a question (which I’ve done on occasion!), Sarah is quick to respond and has tagged the community when it’s relevant to everyone.

My Thoughts and Experiences

When we first started using this program, it was too soon. My daughter was able to read the sounds but she couldn’t blend them together. She had trouble with several of the exercises and got to the point that she wasn’t trying and I was getting frustrated. So I gave up. For a few months or longer. We have a ton of other activities that we do, and I decided to work on her spelling instead. I shared words and sounded them out so she could figure out how they were spelled. I think this contributed to her better experience and greater success with RBT the next time around.

My daughter is still learning to read, but she will ask for this program and try to read the stories and has found success with some, and difficulties with others. But she also has an amazing memory and remembers the words she’s supposed to be reading (even a week or two later!) so we can’t reuse the stories. Learning is a process. The important thing is that she still loves books and loves when I read to her. Based on RBT, I will often look for CVC words when reading, and I will stop and wait for her to sound them out and read them to me. Since these books aren’t “school” books, she doesn’t have them memorized, so it’s great to see her progress. 

Overall Thoughts

Reading Better Together is a great reading curriculum to use in the home. You may need to supplement the learning process with other ideas and books if your child is as precocious as mine, or you may be able to use the curriculum as is. From the start, Sarah reminds you that she reads with her kids everyday to help establish their enjoyment and encourage them to want to read. But every child is different and you may need to cater the learning process to your child. For example, each day there are up to 6 words that your child will read individually. My daughter easily got distracted by the words on the page, so I learned to cover the other words so she could focus on the one we were working on. I also learned that it was helpful for her to skip around to the word families to better understand how switching letters affected the words (such as “mop”, “top”, and “bop”, or “bot” and “pot”) instead of reading through them in the order they were on the page.

If you’re looking to teach your child/ren to read, Reading Better Together is a fun curriculum that you can experience with your children. Sarah provides support and can help brainstorm ideas to help it to meet your child’s needs.

Interview with Sarah Miller, creator of Reading Better Together

Hi Sarah! Can you share a little about yourself for my readers?

Hi Kristen! I am a homeschool mom of two amazing kids, who have always been homeschooled. I am also a teacher with a degree in education and over a decade of experience teaching kids from preschool all the way through high school. My passion is helping homeschool parents teach their kids to read with confidence, and I love using the science of how kids learn to read to create and share resources that make learning to read easy and fun.

What inspired you to create the Reading Better Together Program?

This program came from my experience teaching my oldest child to read. I really struggled with the resources that were available to me as a homeschool parent- the ones that taught reading in the way that his brain needed to learn were so boring, and really sucked the fun out of reading. I was watching my son’s love of books and of reading disappear day by day as we practiced reading together. I looked high and low for options but I couldn’t find another program that used real books to help my son see what we were working towards. At our library, we found a single side by side reading book. It was out of print, but we read it over and over, because the experience of reading something with a cover and pages helped him to see WHY we were practicing reading: so he would be able to read the books that he loved for himself. Eventually I created more side by side reading books and a whole reading curriculum based around them.

(Playing Devil’s Advocate here…) What qualifies parents to teach their kids to read? Wouldn’t it be better to go to a professional?

As a former teacher and current homeschool parent, I have seen both sides of this and I firmly believe that parents are their children’s best teachers. Although teachers may have specialized knowledge about the subject area that they are teaching, parents have specialized knowledge too… about their child. Parents know their specific child better than anyone else on Earth does: what they like and dislike, what motivates them and what discourages them, and even how they learn best. This knowledge is invaluable in teaching any subject, but especially reading. At the end of the day, we aren’t just teaching reading, math, or science. We’re teaching a child. And homeschool parents understand that truth in such a deep way that is so easily lost in a classroom. It is so much easier to learn how to teach reading than it is to build that deep relationship with a child that their parents already have.

What other products or programs do you offer?

Homeschool parents who are looking for a full curriculum might also be interested in Homeschooling Better Together. This membership includes a full unit study based curriculum every month for kids in preschool through 5th grade, and includes all the subjects that everyone in the family can learn together for just $5/month.

How can my readers connect with you online?

You can visit the blog at https://homeschooling4him.com/

Thank you so much for your time! And thanks for joining us In Our Homeschool!