This is a wonderful book for educating your late toddler to pre-school child to read from scratch.

Given its American publication, its spelling guidance does favour their spelling (favor, color, meter, center, aluminum etc) but if you know where to pick up on those things for our Australian English, you'll be golden.

But to the publisher: please produce an Australian variant, it'd be much simpler. There's no DISTAR foundation book for teaching spelling in Australia, and this is the next best thing.

I've been doing one lesson per day religiously and although we're now just at lesson 39 I can say my 4 years-old daughter is already reading. Unfortunately, at the moment she's not passionate about the lessons, but at least she doesn't hate them anymore. However, I can understand her reasons, as the first 14 lessons are quite boring for such a young kid and also she had some trouble with the comprehension exercises to a degree in which she nearly refused to do them at all. Fortunately, since she grasped the concept of how she can answer the questions (which is listening to what she's reading), the lessons are gradually becoming more enjoyable for both of us. Also, her writing performance at kinder improved significantly. This book do delivers what it promises.

Great book. Does what it says on the cover my son is up to lesson thirty and reading. Dodgy editing but still double thumbs up from me.