The Little Angels Series are four soft cover readers that teach all phonics sounds using word drill pages and phonetic stories. It teaches letter-sound relationships systematically, beginning with the easiest letter sounds. The word drill pages provide practice in decoding words containing the letter sounds. The stories with phonetically-controlled vocabulary follow each word drill page. They provide practice in decoding words in context and build comprehension skills. The stories are about Catholic family life, Bible stories, and Saint stories as well as fables and folk tales. The illustrations are well done and many are in color. Review pages are provided at regular intervals.

The workbooks are consumable and accompany the readers. They reinforce the lessons from the readers with exercises in phonics, vocabulary, reading comprehension and handwriting.

The Teacher's manual provides detailed lesson plans and suggestions for related activities. The manual provides daily lesson plans for teaching the entire series. The lessons cover reading readiness, phonics, listening skills, vocabulary, handwriting, comprehension and spelling. There are also multi-sensory activities included to accommodate children who have different learning styles. The pace is very flexible so you progress at *your* child's speed. The manual also contains progress test after each review to assess how well your child is doing.

Sequence of Phonics Reader A - Consonants, short vowels Reader B - final blends, -ed, -ing, long vowels, two-syllable words Reader C - Beginning consonant blends, Y as a vowel, Consonant digraphs, R- controlled vowels Reader D - vowel digraphs and diphthongs, soft c and g, Irregular sounds and spellings

The author holds a MEd in Reading from the University of Missouri-St Louis and is certified in Learning Disabliites. She has six years classroom experience and nine years experience in home education.

I am using the Little Angels in place of the MCP phonics that Seton sends with their First Grade Curriculum. If you need something for Kindergarten, with beginning sounds and letter recognition, I highly recommend Seton's Kindergarten Phonics for Young Catholics. I have had great success with the Little Angels series with my daughter who is now finishing Reader D. She is 8 years old. My son who is 7, could not wait to start the readers and is also on Reader D. The Little Angels Phonics Series is really a wonderful tool for teaching your children to read.

This simple workbook provides practice for preschool and kindergarten aged children in writing numbers, counting objects and considering religious ideas associated with each number (one God, two natures: human and divine, three Divine Persons, four marks of the Church: One - Holy - Catholic - Apostolic, five Sacred Wounds, etc.). There are three pages each for the numbers one through ten which contain writing lines for handwriting practice of the numbers, related black and white illustrations to color, pictures to circle and count, etc. The remaining pages provide practice in counting sets of things ("circle the correct number" for several pages and "write the correct number" for others). The final eight pages offer simple exercises involving numerical order, more and less, some very basic addition and simple shapes. The pages would have to be read aloud to young children.

The Parent's Guide offers steps to prepare your child to read by using the enclosed flashcards (printed on card stock) to gain letter and sound recognition and then proceeding to work on pre-reading blends (with the pre-reading sound blend sheets that are included in the program and printed on card stock). After these steps are accomplished, the child will be ready to proceed to the phonics readers. The parent's guide also offers discussion questions to help your child get more out of each story.

There are four sets of readers, each set being identified by its own color. The booklets and flash cards come as an 8 1/2 x 11 pad. Each booklet starts out as a regular-sized piece of paper which you fold into four to form a child-sized booklet.

Level 1 contains 15 booklets. The story titles are: "At Mass", "Stop! Hot Pot!", "Sad Nip", "Mud on the Rug", "The Hot Pup", "Mom Gets Help", "The Rat", "Little Ann", "Bat the Ball", "Funny Ann", "The Campers", "God With Us", and "Messy Room".

This set starts with simple words such as "pat" and "sat" and progresses slowly to more complex words like "tent", "small" and "under".

Level 2 contains 10 booklets. The story titles are: "Dad's Cake", "Mrs. May is Sick", "Mike's Bike", "Visit the Sick", "We Hope to See the Pope", "The Little Goat with No Sense", "The Cold Rain", "Feed the Hungry", "The Tease", and "Noon Potluck."

This level starts with words like: "cake" and "taste" and progresses to words like "salad", "baby" and "table".

Level 3 contains 10 booklets. The story titles are: "Ann Cleans the Church", "Blessed Sacrament", "St. Paul", "A Toy for a Boy", "At the Beach", "The Found Rosary", "Run the Race", "School, Where?", "The Quake", and "I Didn't Know".

The starts with words like "kneel" and "holy" and progresses to words like "receive" and "neighbor".

Level 4 contains 10 booklets. The story titles are: "The Bright Star", "The Caught Calf", "Mr. Brown's First Holy Communion", "Kim's Adoption" (in two parts), "In the Match Box", "Badge Fudge", "Squirt", and "Our Lady's Secret".

This level starts with words like: "night" and "follow" and progresses to words like "cheerfully" and "enough".