First Reading Lessons Book II – Teacher’s Notes

First Reading Lessons are Charlotte Mason’s reading lessons brought to life. In her book, Home Education Volume 1, Charlotte describes how the process of teaching reading should be done. First Reading Lessons Book II takes her suggestions and puts them into concrete, practical, daily lessons.

In these lessons, audible and visual recognition are used together in a complimentary way. Exercises involve learning new, sight words and building a store of phonetic words by sound recognition. Common phonetic letter combinations are taught. There are various activities in these lessons to engage the student with variety. Classic art, poetry, word searching, making and matching lists, forming sentences with word-cards, and writing words are among the components of a lesson. Grammar and punctuation are naturally weaved through the lessons.

With one-hundred and fifty five lessons, working through 14 poems this is a full, thorough curriculum. The lessons move in a spiraling fashion. All words used throughout the curriculum are introduced as new words, so a student does not need any prior reading experience. Then throughout the lessons the student continues to work with new words as well as words from previous lessons. The lessons build, word upon word, until they have accomplished working with hundreds of words on a consistent basis over the course of the lessons. Because of the nature of a typical Charlotte Mason lesson avoids dull, mindless, repetitive drill, the poetry and work done throughout the course will benefit not only a beginning student but also an emergent reader.

The Teacher’s Notes are designed to be open and go. The Notes guide the teacher through each reading lesson. Each opening lesson begins as the student views a picture which encompasses the theme of the poetry selection to be studied. Eight to twelve lessons follow studying the sight words and families of words found in the poetry selection. Each lesson begins with teacher summary and review. Student interaction throughout the lessons involves listening to sounds, making word lists, and finding words.

Sentences are made with word cards using new words studied in the lesson. To build confidence through practice, lessons exclusively use words that the student has worked with in previous lessons.

Word cards for this curriculum are part of the purchase of the Notes and are sent in a printable file.

At the end of a daily lesson, a selection of the words learned can be written by the student using the Word List Copybook. This serves as both a sight review of the words as well as handwriting practice. After eight to twelve daily lessons the poetry selection is read by the student with the instructor.

Other resources for this curriculum are the Pictures and Poems book which allows the student his own copy for reading the poems and looking at the pictures found throughout the course.

Published by Real Living Life, 2023
By Charlotte M. Mason
Edited and revised by Lisa M. Eveland