Christ Centered Phonics

Christ Centered Publications

Christ Centered Phonics does an excellent job of incorporating Scriptural principles, Bible stories, and Christian character development into their program. This program encourages brief academic periods for three-year-olds, with gradually longer teaching periods for four-year-olds and up. The sequential format with lots of repetition makes this possible. This is a very detailed, structured program with accompanying teacher’s guides that are necessary to the program. Word-for-word lessons make it easy for the inexperienced teacher to present lessons.

You can purchase the items needed for the Christ Centered Phonics program individually. However, the publisher has created discounted packages that include both phonics and math curriculum.

There are four levels (and four packages) offered by Christ Centered Publications: K3, K4, K5s/B1st, and A1st/2nd. A number of resources in younger level packages are reused in subsequent years, so your actual cost for a second year of the program is likely to be significantly less than the complete package cost.

The K3 package includes Doreen Claggett’s book Never Too Early that fully explains the philosophy of the program; Teaching 3s Character, Phonics, and Math booklet; Creative Family Times; Christ-Centered Phonics Flashcards; Alphabet & Numbers Tracing Sheets; Christ-Centered Math Flashcards; 0-100 Numbers Chart; and Christ-Centered Animal Stories CD. Christ Centered Math components are included at this level as well in the K4 and K5s/B1st levels.

The K4 package expands significantly as you move into more structured and comprehensive teaching. The package components are too numerous to list, but they include teaching instructions, teaching aids, and workbooks that cover math, phonics, spelling, and manuscript penmanship plus some parent help books.

The K5s/B1st package is structured like the K4 package but at increasing levels of difficulty. The package continues with Christ Centered Phonics coupled with Professor B’s Mathematics program.

Beginning with K4, Phonics Lessons for Flashcards books that use various visual aids from the packages introduce the 118 cards in the Phonics Flashcards set plus spelling rules, beginning grammar, vocabulary development, dictionary skills, and writing exercises. K4 uses only the first two of these four Lessons books; K5s/B1st level uses the first three books; and A1st/2 nd omits the first book and uses the last three.

A Phonics Teaching Aids Package is one of the components of the K4 and K5s/B1st packages. Teaching aids in the package are Alphabet Wall Cards, Phonics Flashcards, Noah's Vowel Song, Vowel Lane Houses, Phonics Drill Charts & Spelling Rules, Jacob's Phonics Ladder, Letter/Blend/Word Search, and Phonics Cassette. These items help in lesson presentation and for providing a multisensory learning experience.

You need not begin with the K3 package. You may start a four-year-old or a kindergartner in the K4 package, or a kindergartner or first grader in K5s/B1st level without having done any formal schooling. There is lots of review and repetition in the program at each level. The A1st/2 nd package is the only one that requires prior foundation in reading. See the review of Christ Centered Math for information about that part of the program.