Evan-Moor publishes easy-to-use workbooks for most subject areas. Some of the workbooks have many styles of activities, while some stick with just one or two styles. Evan-Moor sells complete grade-level bundles comprised of these workbooks, although if used for every subject, students would complete a huge amount of workbook pages. Still, workbooks can be a great tool in many situations.
Evan-Moor offers phonics bundles for grades one through three that include grade-level workbooks from the three series Basic Phonics Skills, Daily Phonics, and Take It to Your Seat: Phonics Centers. The Take It to Your Seat: Phonics Centers books require way too much work for homeschool families, so I would skip the bundles and purchase individual books. Not included in the bundles is another series titled Word Family Stories and Activities.
All the books described here are reproducible and available in print or as PDFs. Teacher editions have printable student pages, so you don’t need student books.
The phonics bundle includes access to a digital, customizable planner developed by an experienced homeschooler. It provides suggested pacing for the books in the bundle, and you can edit it to suit your situation.
Here are my recommendations and comments.
Basic Phonics Skills
Basic Phonics Skills books A through D for kindergarten through third grade run about 300 pages each. The books are described as supplemental, but they can serve well as your core phonics instruction. They begin with phonemic awareness, print awareness, and sound-symbol association, and continue through an orderly presentation of phonics.
These books include exercise pages that require writing, “slider” activities (cut-out strips inserted in pages to form different words), cut-and-paste activities, readers assembled from pages near the back of each book, instructions for the teacher, and record-keeping forms. These black-and-white books have plenty of illustrations.
Parents need to work closely with students to ensure that they are reading and pronouncing words correctly.
Students are told to write letters of the alphabet and words, but the books do not provide explicit handwriting instruction. (Evan-Moor has workbooks for teaching both printing and cursive in traditional, modern, and contemporary styles.)
Daily Phonics
Daily Phonics workbooks provide lots of practice in identifying beginning, middle, and ending sounds. If you purchase the teacher’s edition, you can print student pages from it, and your answer key is at the end of the book. This teacher's edition provides substantial teaching support not included in student books.
The black-and-white student workbooks have a great deal of repetition. I would use them to supplement instruction if a student were to encounter problems identifying particular sounds.
Word Family Stories and Activities
I would be more likely to use books A through D from the Word Family Stories and Activities series to supplement the Basic Phonics Skills series rather than Daily Phonics. The Word Family workbooks have brief stories and various activities that each focus on particular word families (e.g., words containing am, ome, or eat). These black-and-white books are available only in teacher editions, and some are only available as PDFs.
Summary
Evan-Moor workbooks provide an inexpensive option for teaching phonics to children in kindergarten through third grade, and they will work best if parents work closely with children until they can read well on their own.
