Our New Apologia Homeschool Reading Curriculum

*Disclosure: I received free curriculum for review purposes and am being compensated for my time. I am not required to give a positive review. As always, I am sharing my honest opinion with you.

We have used Apologia science curriculum for years in our homeschool, and last year added in the What We Believe series. I was so excited to discover that they have a new reading curriculum by Debra Bell. (She also wrote one of my favorite homeschooling how-to guides: The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling.)

Our New Homeschool Curriculum

Readers in Residence Vol. 1 is a reading comprehension, literature, and vocabulary program for 4th-6th graders, or older struggling readers. I am using it for my 7th grader. She is no longer a struggling reader, but we spent so many years getting to that point that she has missed out on learning terms like genre, inference, and figures of speech.

This curriculum is pretty much open & go, with the student text and workbook combined into one. There is a daily schedule in the book that allows my daughter to work independently.

I have her mark each day’s pages with sticky flags so she knows where to start & stop without referring back to the schedule several rimes.

Important words are highlighted throughout the lessons and then defined in the margin. This makes it easy to flip back through if a refresher is needed while working on an assignment.

Readers in Residence uses quality literature to teach literary elements. At first glance, I wondered if the books would be too easy for my 7th grader.

It only took a couple of lessons for me to realize the wisdom in using lower level books. My daughter is able to fully concentrate on the concepts in the lesson without having to struggle to comprehend a difficult text.

Each unit has a rubric checklist. It is super easy to understand and allows a student to know what is expected in the assignments.

One feature that I think is really neat is the Meet the Author section. It is cool to get a little background info and see a pic of the person who wrote the book that you are currently reading.