Counting Pinecones: The Magic Stories (A Homeschool Crew Review)

These last few weeks, Ashleigh has been working her way through reading The Magic Stories from Allsaid & Dunn, LLC, publishers of The Reading Game and authors of the Wordly Wise series.

The Magic Stories is a series of six stories with activities designed to be used as a supplemental reading program for 2nd-3rd grade reading levels. Each story exposing readers to 40 different "Naughty Words" (words that tend to be confusing such as although, brought and caught) that are used within the story. Printable Cards of each word along with each word used within a sentence is available to print out and can be used to help children to recognize and pronounce the word when they come across it while reading the story.

The Six Stories are:

The Magic Hole – Ping Ho finds a bag with a magic hole which changes her family’s life.
The Magic Ax – Tom learns the value of hard work
The Magic Joke – An unhappy king and a Princess, war and laughing
The Magic Hotdog – Alfred can’t stop eating hot dogs
The Magic Boots – Patty was accidentally given goblin boots
The Magic Box – A Rumpelstiltskin story

Each of the stories are downloadable PDF files that can be printed out either each page on 8.5"x11" or double sided and assembled for a smaller booklet. The stories are also optimized for use on an Ipad or computer screens. Stories are roughly 20 pages each with black line illustrations that children can also color and personalize, making the story their own. Additional worksheets are also available that include activities such as reading comprehension questions, writing exercises, reading proficiency and word assessment to gauge how well your child can recognize the naughty words both before and after the story.

How We Used It

I decided to initially use this with Ashleigh, who is my reader. Ash and I would spend a bit of time each night reading from one of the books that I printed out for her.

For each book, we also printed out the flash cards. Ashleigh would go through each of the "Naughty Words" and if she had a bit of trouble with one of the words, we would be able to focus on that particular word before she got to the stories to help her become familiar with it. She actually knew most of the words already and did not struggle with them before we began with the stories.

Ashleigh really liked the stories. Her favorite was the very first story, The Magic Hole. These stories are very well written and are very imaginative while teaching a moral.

We did find that the stories were a bit too long for Ash to read in one sitting. We ended up breaking each story up over two or three days. We simply would come to a stopping point and pick up where we left off the next night. This allowed for us to actually discuss the story more in depth as well as allow Ashleigh to work on predicting what would happen later in the story.

Since we were doing this as part of her nightly independent reading, even though I was having her read aloud, I did not have her fill out the worksheets. However, we did sit down with them and have her orally answer the questions. The worksheets covered a variety of language arts topics, such as recognizing read vs imaginary or using their imagination to describe a scenario given.

We have really enjoyed these stories and I'm looking forward to using them with Garrett in the near future.