Happy Cheetah Complete Reading System

SKU
077660
Grade K-2
Neutral
Medium Teacher Involvement
Multi-Sensory
No other materials needed
Sequential
Teaching Method
Traditional
Teacher-centered curriculum commonly used in classrooms that may include a text, teacher manual, tests, etc.
Charlotte Mason
A methodology based on the work of a 19th century educator who maintained that children learn best from literature (Living Books), not textbooks.
Classical
A methodology based on the Latin Trivium (three stages of learning), including the grammar stage (memorization and facts), logic stage (critical thinking), and rhetoric stage (developing/defending ideas).
Unit Study
A thematic or topical approach centered around one topic that integrates multiple subject areas.
Montessori (Discovery)
A methodology based on the work of a 20th century educator that emphasizes student and sensory-driven discovery learning and real-life applications.
Religious Content
Christian/Religious
Faith-based or including instructional religious content.
Neutral
Avoids religious or theoretical topics or presents multiple viewpoints without preference.
Secular
Contains content contrary to common Christian beliefs (i.e. evolution).
Learning Modality
Auditory
Learns through listening, talking out loud or reading out loud.
Visual
Learns through seeing, prefers written instructions and visual materials.
Kinesthetic/Tactile (Hands-On)
Learns through moving, doing and touching.
Multi-Sensory
Curriculum that employ a variety of activities/components.
Presentation
Sequential
Curriculum progresses through well-defined learning objectives. Emphasizes mastery before moving to the next topic.
Spiral
Topics and concepts are repeated from level to level, adding more depth at each pass and connecting with review.
Conceptual/Topical
Focus is on the “why,” often with a unifying concept as well as specific skills; coverage may be broader.
Teacher Involvement
Low Teacher Involvement
Student-led materials; parent acts as a facilitator.
Medium Teacher Involvement
A mix of teacher-led time and independent student work.
High Teacher Involvement
Teacher-led lessons; may utilize discussions, hands-on activities and working together.
Additional Materials Required
No other materials needed
Everything you need is included.
Other Materials Required
There are additional required resources that are a separate purchase.
Other Materials Optional
There are additional resources mentioned or recommended but are not absolutely necessary.
Consumable
Consumable
Designed to be written in; not reusable.
Non-Consumable
Not designed to be written in; reusable.
Our Price
$399.00
Description

Happy Cheetah is engaging and fun for students with multi-sensory learning, practical workbook-based lessons, readers with colorful, cheerful illustrations, and games/activities for fun and reinforcement. Happy Cheetah calms parents (no prep time; just follow the lessons written simply for each day). Born out of educational training and years of classroom, homeschooling, and tutoring experience, Dr. Karen (author of Spelling You See) has created a developmental reading program that is winsome, thorough, easy to use, and effective. A complete language arts program, Happy Cheetah includes phonics, handwriting, capitalization and punctuation, spelling, reading comprehension, and creative expression. The Complete Reading System includes everything you need: five workbooks, 12 readers, various pamphlets and brochures, magnetic dry-erase board, a-b-c-d cards, dry-erase markers, dry-erase alphabet tracing cards (4" x 5½"), magnetic letters, card game sets 1, 2, & 3 (2" x 3½" cards), post-it labeling and coverup tape, pencil grip, mini-colored pencils, and special bonus, EASY button.

Publisher's Description of Happy Cheetah Complete Reading System

Everything you need to teach your child to read in 20 minutes a day!

Fast. Effective. Easy. Fun.

Your children will learn to read—guaranteed! Whether your child is brand new to reading or has persevered for several years already, your child can achieve reading success.

With stories as the foundation of Happy Cheetah Reading, your student learns the individual details of reading, such as proper spelling and grammatical cues like quotation marks, in the context of the story. Each smaller element is already included in the big picture. Nothing is out of order; everything is linked.

These links rapidly build knowledge, without confusion. Like looking at the box before assembling a puzzle—there's a framework in place.

Happy Cheetah combines the big picture with the smaller details in order to teach reading ... simply, easily, and quickly.

WHAT'S INCLUDED IN THE HAPPY CHEETAH READING PROGRAM?

  • Level 1 Package:
  • Get Ready Workbook, Cub Starting Workbook, Readers Set: My Family, Nana and Papa, and Things I Like, Game Card Set, Dry Erase Markers, Happy Cheetah Exclusive: Clear Letter Writing Whiteboard, Happy Cheetah Exclusive: Magic Key Magnetic Letters and Alphabet Cards

  • Level 2 Package:
  • Cub Walking Workbook, Readers Set: My Day and We Have Fun

  • Level 3 Package:
  • Cub Running Workbook, Readers Set: Home and Farm Animals, Bugs and Small Animals, Land and Sea Animals and Zoo Animals

  • Level 4 Package:
  • Cheetah Ready Workbook, Readers Set: Birds and Jobs, Fairy Tales Retold Part 1, and Fairy Tales Retold Part II, Set of small colored pencils

    Additional Items:

    • Alphabet Tracing Cards, Dr. Karen's Preferred Pencil Grip for Perfect Practice, Dr. Karen's Constant Encouragement Button, Post-It Covering Tape, ABCD Bookmarks
    • BONUS!

      Dr. Karen's CURE for Reading and Writing Challenges book. Dyslexia, dysgraphia. carelessness, laziness ... A wide range of issues associated with reading and schoolwork are being misdiagnosed ... and the problems can be cured — permanently and easily. If your child struggles with reading and spelling, or has been labeled or diagnosed with dyslexia, dysgraphia or ADD/ADHD, Dr. Karen Holinga, creator of Happy Cheetah Reading System, has words of help and hope for you.

    WHAT WILL YOUR STUDENT LEARN IN EACH LEVEL?

    • Level 1:
    • If your student is still working on writing capital and lowercase letters easily—or if your student hasn't started writing yet!—start here. As you transition from the Get Ready Workbook to the Cub Starting Workbook, beginning readers will learn more about writing. Students read thirty simple stories with this workbook. This builds confidence, as they enjoy immediate success.

      In this level, your student will:

      • Learn to write all capital and lowercase letters quickly and easily. Copy short sentences, like: "My fish is orange." Identify which sounds go with which letters. Accurately write short words, such as "lag," "mug," and "fed." Properly write his or her name, starting with a capital and using lowercase letters. Read dozens of non-phonetic words, such as water, towel, polka-dot, look, boat, yellow, shells, and find. Identify vowels and vowel chunks (two vowels together, as in raccoon), the start of spelling instruction. Work with basic grammar and punctuation. Practice the intuitive reading methods that all successful readers use. Sound out and write high-frequency words easily and quickly, using lowercase letters.

    • Level 2:
    • With Level 2, students build on what they already know. It is an excellent level to continue to grow reading confidence and fluency.

      In this level, your student will:

      • Grow vocabulary. Learn to read a wide range of challenging words, such as pizza, elephant, bubbles, sweet, and books. Continue to work on identifying vowels and vowel chunks, moving towards proper spelling. Continue working with basic grammar and punctuation. Continue to practice the intuitive reading methods that all successful readers use. Sound out and write additional high-frequency words easily and quickly, using lowercase letters.

    • Level 3:
    • With Level 3, students rapidly expand on what they already know. As students read longer passages, they continue to grow reading confidence and fluency.

      In this level, your student will:

      • Gain additional new vocabulary. Learn to read a wide range of challenging words, such as camouflage, museums, weigh, lantern, social, and tongue. Continue to work on identifying vowels and vowel chunks, developing the visual memory necessary for proper spelling. Continue working with basic grammar and punctuation. Continue to practice the intuitive reading methods that all successful readers use. Sound out and write additional high-frequency words easily and quickly, using lowercase letters.

    • Level 4:
    • With Level 4, the rate of improvement skyrockets. As students read ever longer passages—with several short paragraphs per page—they continue to grow reading confidence and fluency.

      In this level, your student will:

      • Gain a lot of additional new vocabulary. Read both nonfiction and fiction. Focus on vowel chunks, Bossy-R in words, and suffixes, in order to develop the visual memory necessary for proper spelling. Continue working with basic grammar and punctuation. Continue to practice the intuitive reading methods that all successful readers use. Sound out and write additional high-frequency words easily and quickly, using lowercase letters.

      ABOUT HAPPY CHEETAH READING WORKBOOKS:

      • Includes 5 levels of workbooks to cover handwriting, phonemic awareness, vowel sounds, sight words, spelling, capitalization, and reinforcement of reading skills. Included in each workbooks are simple lesson plans to help teach your child to read backed by years of academic research used in classrooms, homeschools and clinical practices.

      ABOUT HAPPY CHEETAH READING READERS:

      • Build your book library with 5 levels of twelve readers that include over 120 stories to go along with your child on their reading journey.

      ABOUT HAPPY CHEETAH READING GAMES & ACTIVITIES:

      • Learning to read can be fun with games, activities, and projects to reinforce and retain reading skills. A Happy Cheetah exclusive, there are three sets of game cards. Play one of four games to help reinforce the words your children already know. Keep learning upbeat and fun!


Category Description for Complete Programs - Phonics

Programs in this section go beyond teaching children how to read, incorporating phonetic readers, spelling and writing as well. Arranged roughly by grade/age.


Category Description for Happy Cheetah Reading System

The Happy Cheetah Reading System includes everything you need to cover phonics and reading skills up through the second-grade level. Engaging and fun, students feel successful from the very first lesson – even if they've previously struggled for years. Delivering lessons that incorporate what Dr. Karen Holinga calls the Three C's of Successful Reading, all instruction begins with stories (Context). Alongside reading practice, word play with magnetic letters, dry-erase board work, drawing opportunities, and games; tracing and letter/word/sentence writing is embedded into the daily lessons from the very beginning (Copywork). Short lessons, sensible and easy-to-follow instructions for the teacher, interesting story content, and very do-able tasks, create an atmosphere of relaxed safety and confidence (Calmness). The result? SUCCESS!

Happy Cheetah is brilliant in its straight-forward simplicity. Working together, teacher and student embark on an adventure. Students revel in the sense of progress and teachers (aka parents) are thrilled with the user-friendly materials and straight-forward methods. If you take the time to read through the introductory information in the workbooks and Dr. Karen's Cure, as well as the pamphlet and booklets that come with the packages, you will glean a wealth of information on how successful readers learn, how the brain works, recognizing possible visual tracking issues, and why it works so well to keep lessons "short and sweet."

Course components are small student-sized readers, plus workbooks. That is everything! All teacher instructions are in the landscape-oriented workbook (left-hand page) so there's no juggling a teacher's manual. The Complete Package and the Grade Level Packages do include a few extras such as game cards, magnetic letters, and a dry erase board, but those are designed to facilitate the learning and provide reinforcement rather than the primary instruction. A fun extra in the Complete Package (also available in the Dr. Karen Office Experience Booster Kit) is the EASY button. This provides an auditory "attaboy" (technically the word "Easy") …roughly akin to a "high five."

Teacher guidelines are practical – keep lessons short, keep them moving (not too much time on any one part of the lesson), set your child up for success, do not teach to a weakness, and stay upbeat, ending the lessons with a smile. You can expect lessons to take 20 minutes – max.

Lessons in the four numbered workbooks are grouped around a series of stories from one of the readers. The first lesson in every grouping has the parent/instructor reading the stories aloud to the student. This is true for the first lesson grouping in the Workbook 1 (Cub Starting) and for the last one in Workbook 4 (Cheetah Ready). The following lessons in each grouping spend time in the stories and encourage working with the words from the stories. Lessons follow a pattern that includes reading and re-reading the stories, magnetic letters (start with a word, change a letter to make a new word and keep going through several words), word building using letter boxes (one square per letter), and a "think and do" exercise that involves visually identifying correct words and sentences. Copywork is a consistent activity through all the lessons in all the workbooks – starting with letters, then words, and almost immediately short sentences. Another consistent activity is giving the student the opportunity to illustrate some aspect of the story. Toward the end of each lesson grouping, there is focused review of both reading and writing (and spelling in the later workbooks). Both teacher and student celebrate the completion of the lessons with a Certification of Achievement award.

Based totally on teacher-student interaction, these lessons are flexible. You should complete what feels comfortable and keeps a positive focus. Each lesson comes with its own built-in checklist but the time frame is up to you. Any teaching information or direction you need is right there in the lesson. Lessons per book vary from 42 in the Yellow (Getting Ready) to 112 in the Blue (Cub Running) and Green (Cheetah Ready) workbooks. As you would expect there is a progression of skills through the books with chunking introduced in the final workbook. [Chunking is a technique for identifying and emphasizing the phonics constructs in words and is a major component in Spelling You See, another program by the Happy Cheetah author.]

In fact, the structure of the Green Cheetah Ready (Workbook 4) changes a bit to include the chunking exercises. These lessons still start with reading the stories and include copywork but chunking is also a regular activity. Chunking requires the student to identify certain letter teams and using colored pencils, mark them. Stories and copywork in this workbook are noticeably longer and an answer key for the chunking is in the back of the book.

The stories in the readers are always the starting place. Cub Starting (Orange Workbook 1) corresponds to Readers 1, 2, & 3. Cub Walking (Red Workbook 2) corresponds to Readers 4 & 5.Cub Running (Blue Workbook 3) corresponds to Readers 6, 7, 8 & 9 while Cheetah Ready (Green Workbook 4) corresponds to Readers 10, 11, & 12. These readers are little-hand size (4 ½"x 5 ½") volumes and they are about 3/8" thick, which gives them a nice, substantial feel. Text is always provided on the left-hand page with colorful and engaging illustrations on the right. Obviously, text size and numbers of words/sentences varies with the progression through the readers. Both workbooks and readers are color-coded.

One of the intriguing aspects of this program is the interplay between the words the student is learning to read and is copying with each lesson and the words they are learning to build using the letter boxes. Reading and copying words grows into multisyllabic words sooner than you might expect, with students reading two and three syllable words by Reader 4. By contrast, in the first three workbooks, only three-and-four letter words are built using the letter boxes. These words grow into three-four-and-five letter spelling words in the Cheetah Ready workbook. Likewise, phonics instruction is embedded throughout the program. Starting with short vowels and progressing through vowel and consonant teams, the presentation eventually covers Bossy-R and endings along the way.

The Getting Ready (Prep) Workbook is used prior to the numbered Cub books. This consumable book is set up in the same user-friendly fashion with teacher notes on the left side of the page and student work on the right. There are five sections in this book which lead the child through the skills needed to jump into the Cub Starting (1) workbook. Sections cover (1) upper case letters in alphabetical order, (2) lowercase letters introduced by stroke, (3) using letters in words - tracing and practicing, (4) letter boxes are introduced illustrating that letters make sounds; then letters build words, (5) writing numerals. Letter practice follows this pattern: instructor's verbal directions (i.e. "down, over, over, over" for an upper case E), air write, dry erase in blank space, write on one line, and write letter on two lines. A specially designed magnetic dry-erase board provides this progression of writing space (blank, one-line, two-line). Letters are introduced one to a page with each including two-line copywork space plus an activity. This two-line copywork space is featured throughout all the workbooks but the line spacing changes from 5/16" in the Prep book to 9/32" in Workbook 2 to ¼" in Workbook 3.

Happy Cheetah means reading SUCCESS – even if (especially if) your child is struggling to learn to read. Just dig in, enjoy, and find yourselves racing away with reading. ~ Janice

Details
More Information
Product Format:Other
Brand:Happy Cheetah
Grades:K-2
EAN/UPC:738435650834
Length in Inches:13.5
Width in Inches:9.625
Height in Inches:6.375
Weight in Pounds:16.4
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