Elson Readers: Book Five

To be fair, I just purchased this and have not started using it with my child yet. After reviewing it and reading a few short stories myself, there is SO MUCH intentionality put into this reader! It is very specifically organized and the stories are curated to be relatively wholesome and very engaging. With this being a reader that was developed decades ago, there are references to recent wars, assumption that the word 'service' may typically be associated with soldiers, etc that seem a little out of place. These brief references make it obvious it has not been written to modern day readers. However these cultural mis-fits also come with a higher level of vocabulary referencing things like a "hearth rug" or "tawny" or "docile" which would not typically be included for a 5th grade reading level. It does feature an extensive glossary at the end of the book and each story has several words they encourage the student to look up the pronunciation and/or the definition including certain phrases they may not fully understand yet. In general, if your kid is a pretty strong reader for their age and not intimidated easily by unfamiliar words or phrases, this could be such a neat resource. Even if you choose to read it together here and there without following the discussion questions and using it as your primary language resource, I am very impressed with the level of literature and variety of vocabulary, structure, etc. If you want to use this as your primary reading, vocabulary, literature curriculum, it can absolutely be enough for all of that. Spelling, writing and penmanship are not addressed explicitly in this curriculum as it's focus is primarily literature-based with a mixture of short stories, poetry, excerpts from larger works, etc.