Hewitt Early Readers, Sets I and II

Hewitt Homeschooling Resources

There are five books in each of these two sets of beginning readers. Each twelve-page reader is illustrated with whimsical, black-and-white line drawings. The readers are phonetic in that they use a controlled vocabulary and include a chart at the beginning of each book showing which phonograms and which sight words students will encounter. However, even the first reader mixes short- and long-vowel words, making even Set I most useful after students have been introduced to most of the phonograms. Vocabulary difficulty increases only slightly in Set II, but there are more words per page.

Books feature animal or insect themes (e.g., bats, worms, foxes, turtles), but the injection of humor into the illustrations makes them unreliable for scientific content (e.g., a turtle with his shell drawn to look like an actual house). I would not use these readers for drill of basic phonograms, but I would use them for supplementary reading material once the phonograms have been learned.