When I first opened the box with Essentials 2nd Edition by Logic of English, I was immediately overwhelmed. There were books and flashcards everywhere. We had never used a product that contained so many parts and pieces! Here’s what’s included:

• The Essentials Teacher’s Guide
• The Essentials Student Workbook
• Spelling Journal
• FIVE sets of Flashcards (Basic phonogram, Spelling Rules, Advanced phonogram, Grammar, and Morphemes)
• Two sets of Phonogram Game cards
• Phonogram Game Tiles
• Phonogram and Spelling Rules Quick Reference
• and Spelling Analysis Card

We also opted for the Essentials Reader Set, a set of three PDF files that include the Reader, a set of passages designed to capture the attention of older students while focusing on the reading rules taught in Essentials; a student activity book; and a teacher’s guide.

As someone who does most of her educating from a tattered library book, opening a box with all of these items was pretty scary. How on earth would I keep track of and use all of this? I am not an organized person and I am not a good planner. I really thought I’d gotten myself in way over my head with this review. Luckily, my optimistic Little Man is always in my corner and ready for a new adventure. He took one look at all these items and got excited. From the minute I opened the box, he started asking when we could “do my new English stuff.” Fortunately for all of us, I can never deny him those moments when he actually WANTS to learn, so we dug in.

Logic of English (LOE) designs all of their curriculum to engage the whole child. This is why there are so many parts and pieces. It’s not just “read this then answer the questions and we’ll test you later,” it’s more “let’s discuss this together, answer some questions, play a game, and write something together.” Essentials focuses on explaining the rules of English and phonics, sort of the “whys” behind the English language. As an eight year old, second(ish) grader, Little Man is at the low end of who this program was designed for. Because it offers so many options as far as games, activities, workbooks, and flashcard work, you can customize what works best for your student. Little Man most enjoys the hands-on aspects. Mostly the card games. He’s gotten a lot out of it and, honestly, knows way more about the rules than I do now.. I think this program would be wonderful for any older student who is struggling with reading, even adults and ESL students.

The Essentials Reader is an optional add-on to this program. I wanted to try it out because I wasn’t sure how strong Little Man’s reading is. I wanted to give him some reading work that compliments the grammar and spelling he was learning with Essentials. Each reading passage in the Reader includes words that the student has been learning in his lessons. There’s a page before the passage that includes a list of the phonograms that were learned in the Essentials lesson, then a passage that includes those words. The passages are one to two pages in the beginning, then get slightly longer the further in you get. There’s a wide variety: some are fiction, some nonfiction; there are poems, articles, even recipes. I think this helps keep the child from getting bored. The student activity book that compliments the Reader is great. It has copywork plus activities that include illustrating passages, creating your own stories, and practical work like venn diagrams and using vocabulary words in new sentences.

Little Man is really, really enjoying this program. He likes all of the hands-on aspects and he is taking well to learning different rules of English. And me? How am I handling all those many parts and pieces? Let me tell you, they are NOT as scary as I originally thought! The Teacher’s Guide is amazing. Everything is so well laid out and scripted that all I need to do is skim through the lesson the night before and make sure I have the correct flashcards and supplies pulled out. There was no reason at all for me to be intimidated. All of those pieces work together to create a really fun, really educational program for my son, and LOE has given me every resource and helpful hint I need to help him through it with no stress on my end. I never would have thought it when we opened that box, but this has been one of the best review experiences we’ve ever had!