UPSTART Review

I wrote a long review of this program when my son was half way through it, now he has graduated I am changing it to point out all the benefits of UPSTART.

Overall, if you spend 20 minutes a day doing this program with your child it will help them a lot.  It teaches both of you to make time to study on a daily basis.  If your child likes "screen time" why not use 20 minutes of it preparing them to learn each day?

The first section of UPSTART that teaches ABC's and 123's is so fun (about two months), but then the effectiveness drops off very quickly as the program turns to a whole word memorization method and this method unfortunately leaves about 20% of children behind while giving quick but limited success to other children.  Memorization always leads to limited success because it fails to give students the tools they need to read ALL words and teaches them to guess at words they don't have memorized (seriously, words are replaced with pictures in UPSTART!)  It also teaches pattern words which is another form of memorization.  This can inadvertently cause children to read right to left in order to locate the pattern first.  There is a ton of this in UPSTART.  Whole-word students will read short books very soon after they start studying, but their abilities will be measured by the number of words they memorize.  These "power" words are longer than phonic combinations and my children have found memorizing them very difficult because due to their engineering brains that can see shapes in all directions, they are still struggling to tell the difference between d and p and q and g among other things.

I believe that phonics is the superior way to learn to read.  Whole word can cause some students to label themselves as not smart and cause them to develop a strong aversion to reading because it is unreasonably difficult.  Phonics is intensive training of the brain to approach words left to right and an understanding of the approximately 50 phonic sounds in our language.  Students don't even have to know the letter names to do it, just 50 small things to memorize.  Once a child has learned all 50 they can read any english word (foreign words might still trip them up).  It takes a long time to learn all the phonics.  (My kids averaged 18 months although a lot of parents do it in 6 months to a year.)  The students may seem behind their peers, but the magic happens when they finish and all of the sudden their 5-10 sight word reading vocabulary becomes ALL words and their reading speed takes off because they are so confident and it never occurs to them to guess.  A popular and super effective phonic program* I know of teaches kids all the phonics in one hundred 20-40 minute lessons.  If I had spent the time on that program that I spent on UPSTART my child might be reading ALL words by now (maybe not because 4 is pretty young to start, 5 is better for most kids).  At the end of UPSTART my child knew one power word, "I" (5651 minutes, 270+ lessons).  He knew more of the ABC's than my other children did before Kindergarten, but not all of them.  I've seen most other children at graduation be able to read short simple books provided by the program using their memorized power words, but my son couldn't read anything.

During UPSTART, I noticed my son doing a lot of backward reading and guessing based on pictures, I started supplementing by doing a lot of left to right practice and phonics for every 20 minutes of UPSTART.  This was basically reteaching because he was getting confused by the method UPSTART used.  I considered quitting, but the folks at upstart where very encouraging and confident so we persisted.  Again, our basic takeaway was my son formed good study habits, knew about half the alphabet at the end and could count to 10.

I used phonics for my other 4 children.  My oldest reads 800 words per minute (way faster than me)!  My other three all read very quickly and above age level.  Most kids don't learn to read from the start with phonics, but it makes for better, faster readers.

After his UPSTART graduation we started FUNNIX an old, but powerful computer-based phonics program.   It isn't even a fraction as fancy as UPSTART, but the results are amazing, my son stopped guessing, stopped being frustrated and started reading a variety of words (not memorized patterns) with long and short vowels within a couple of weeks.  UPSTART prepared him for this(yay!), but FUNNIX was where he got the real tools he needed and where the presentation of material was in a simpler more logical progression.  Throw your sight words list in the garbage and get a phonics book or computer program.

Also recommended
*Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelmann