The Rime to Read series of 20 books, designed for the earliest readers, is based on word families (or “rimes” as the technical word would be). Starting with the “at” family and moving through to the “ug” family, the series covers 20 rimes and 46 high frequency words such as the, is, and.

These books are similar in some ways to other beginning readers you may have seen. The text is simple and consists mainly of the members of whichever word family is being introduced (Pat sat on the fat cat). The rimes or word families are color coded throughout the series. For example, “-un” is always orange, “-ig” is always green, “-ed” is always red. You might see a sentence like “Fred the Pig is fun.” This is intended as a visual clue for children to help them quickly determine which rime family a word belongs to. Personally, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. How easily can every child make the change from color-coded reading to reading all black text? It seems that this would be confusing to at least some children.

Another way this series is different is that the illustrations “enhance the story” instead of simply reflecting it. In many readers, the illustration is such a complete match for the page’s text that the child can easily “read the picture” without ever decoding the words. Rime to Read has attempted to alleviate that problem.

Using a program called All About Spelling, for which I’ll be writing a review later in the month, I began teaching four-year-old James the phonograms. Once he had learned all those contained in the first Rime to Read book (Pat), we sat down to look at it. At first, he was a little uncertain but he quickly began to “get into” decoding the words. He ended up reading the entire book, and we all cheered. He was extremely excited and majestically happy to have read his first book all by himself.

While Rime to Read claims to “actually teach reading,” saying that “every single word is taught,” I’m afraid I can’t wholly agree with them. Successful reading must be based on a knowledge of phonograms, the sounds of each letter and letter combination. The Rime to Read series is simply books. There is no instruction behind the books. The parent will need to teach many of the phonograms before beginning this series and will need to continue teaching the remaining phonograms apart from reading the books.

We’ll definitely continue using Rime to Read as James learns to read more and more. The books are virtual, meaning we read them on the computer via the Rime to Read website. You have the option to print each book one time, but I’m afraid that would use quite a bit of ink. I’d like to have the option to purchase print books or even to find these books in my local bookstore, but I don’t think the authors have any plans to print physical copies.

The price is $9.99 per set of 4 books ($2.50 per book) or $44.99 for all 20 books ($2.25 per book). You’ll be able to read the first book free before deciding whether you want to purchase additional books.