How I Prep All About Reading to Reuse
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For anyone new here, we LOVE All About Reading. It is how I have taught my first two children to read, and it has been such a wonderful curriculum for our family. If you are interested in why I love it, I have a full review. The biggest downside is it is also on the pricey side, no question. When we bought All About Reading, however, I went in with the hope/assumption/idea that we would only buy it once and reuse it for our family. Now, on our second child using All About Reading, I can confidently say you absolutely do not need to buy anything more than once. So, while All About Reading is pricey, it is much more affordable than a subscription and, depending on the number of children, may even be more reasonable than many use-and-rebuy curricula.
One of the unique aspects of All About Reading is that it focuses just on reading. There is hardly any writing throughout the whole program. We pretty much skipped any activity that involved writing. This makes it much easier than most curricula to reuse. Even if you do all the writing, it would include photocopying a very small number of pages.
To reuse All About Reading with future children, I started by getting a simple 1 ½ inch binder and page protectors. Each time I prepped a lesson for my first son, I took all the activities and reading sheets and put them in a page protector in the binder. All About Reading requires a fair bit of cutting out activities, so I would make sure to do that the night or weekend before I taught him. I put them in the page protector with a paperclip. When I taught him, I pulled from there. Then, after teaching, they went straight back in. This made it very easy 2 years later to pull for my daughter!
I did laminate a few things, but not many. The monster from level one was such a hit, we used it nearly halfway through level 1. They actually provide an extra monster in the back of the teacher’s guide, and I believe it is on their website for free to print as well. However, I laminated it to make it more durable for repeated use. Overall, however, I left the papers as they are. Once I emptied each activity book (at the end of teaching my son that level), I cut the front off and put it in the front of the binder. I believe All About Reading started offering printable covers for saving in binders as well, but this always worked well for me. Then, I recycled the empty book.
For the teacher’s guide, there is nothing to worry about. It is just a book and can be filed away with the binder. In terms of the flash cards, at the end of each level, I moved them from the box to a bag. Unfortunately, all the flash cards do not fit together in the box (I think 2 or maybe even part of 3 levels do, but they do not all fit together). Ideally, I would have put the flash cards in order and maybe put a rubber band around them. I did not do this, so when my daughter gets to a new level, I just go through the flash cards and order them then. It is a bit more work and ultimately is a decision on when to do that work.
I think that’s it! That’s how I save all of our All About Reading materials for use by future children. We do not use the tracker with stickers, but if you do, you can put it in a page protector and put stickers on top of the page protector or print an extra tracker from their website. They also have extras of the certificates on their website. One note: I do not use their letter tiles (or app). The app is a one-time payment, which I do have to hand to them. I feel like everything has become a subscription these days. However, I found their physical tiles such a mess. I use this instead. While they do not line up exactly color-wise (this bothers me most on bossy-r), I think it is worth it for the much easier organization.
The wonderful thing about this method with All About Reading is not only that you save lots of money by only buying it once, but everything is also prepped for you! It was actually much easier the second time to teach than it had been the first because I wasn’t doing any cutting materials!
