Lovevery Reading Skills Set Review
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Since the Lovevery reading skills set was released I think this has been my most asked question! Almost daily I get someone asking what I think about the Lovevery reading skills set-even before I got it myself. I bought this set with my own money. I am also considering purchasing another set with my own money. Absolute full disclosure is I actually reached out about if they would gift an earlier level so I could try it for this review and they said they are not gifting at this time. This review goes through my honest thoughts of the reading skills set and our experience with the third level.
First, there is some major sticker shock opening up the website for the reading skills set. My first thought was “no way.” I sent it to a friend because of my shock at the price. I know different people respond to marketing differently but I think I would have responded better to seeing the price tag of $155 for one of them versus seeing $420 on top. That number, which is for all 3 of the sets, shocked me. Yes, it is cheaper than buying all 3 separately but the number was a bit hard for me to get past! I did eventually scroll down and look at what was being offered in each set and decided $155 was within reason for the set that would fit our needs.
I ended up opting to buy the third stage in the set. This includes skills typically introduced in 1st and 2nd grade, such as long vowels, bossy R, suffixes, and eventually chapter books. I was pleased that even though my son is much younger than this, the content worked well for him. Often, 1st and 2nd grade books get into some silly humor I would prefer not to introduce. These, on the other hand, are very wholesome. The games are also simple enough to play with my 3-year-old.
Set 3 consists of 3 games, a semi-madlibs style magnet activity set, and a large collection of early reader paperbacks. I will go through my thoughts on each part.
First, the games. The first game in the set is “Ends with E Adventure.” This practices magic E. Children will read a word without the e at the end and add the e changing it to a long vowel word. My son was already very confident with this type of word when we got this set but it was still very fun! There are two types of cards you can get: adding the e or identifying the missing vowel. The game itself is a bit like Candyland or Chutes and Ladders but with some major twists and without the possibility of going backward that can make the game take hours.
The second game is working on vowel teams with a penguin walk. This combines reading vowel team words and a fun balancing iceberg activity at the end. When we played this my son was pretty good with these words but did benefit from the practice. The practice was so fun! The iceberg part at the end was fun too and worked on frustration tolerance!
The final game was an r-controlled vowel frog hop. This worked on bossy r words. Here the goal is to make a path for the frog across the pond of r-controlled vowel words! It was simple and an enjoyable game.
I felt like all 3 games had some real thought put into them. None of them were just regurgitated Candyland and all had something beyond just reading in them to make them fun! For us I didn’t feel the practice of the games was that necessary but if we had introduced them earlier in my son’s reading journey it would have been incredibly helpful.
The final activity, the prefix and suffix story set, was the one skill that my son had not mostly already mastered when we got the set. This was also the activity I thought he would love the most. I had been thinking for a bit he would LOVE madlibs but not being able to write letters makes that difficult. I found, however, this was the activity he was the least interested in. It isn’t as similar to madlibs as I had hoped. There were some fun sort of riddle ones, but a lot of the stories only really made sense with one of the options. The other options often just didn’t make sense versus being funny like madlibs. I think this is the reality of it being designed to work specifically on prefixes and suffixes but it just wasn’t as much as a hit here as I expected. It generally felt more like finding the right word versus creating your own story, with a few exceptions. There were some fun riddle-type ones though that my son really enjoyed.
The other aspect of the reading skills set is the books. The books in the 3rd set cover Magic E, vowel teams, R-controlled vowels, prefixes and suffixes, and chapter books. Each of those categories has a set of associated books. These books, like Lovevery books tend to be, are excellent. Lovevery books have been a favorite in our home since the early days and these are no different. My son was instantly drawn to them. I think it is the real pictures and relatable stories they offer. My son loved them. When we first got the set he was reading the Magic E ones, vowel teams, and R-controlled vowels. A bit later I introduced the prefix and suffix ones and then chapter books.
I found these books are not as forced as so many phonics-based beginner reader decodable books. Yes, they repeat the same rule throughout for practice, but they don’t feel overdone. I thought this was wonderful since often the books feel more like they’re trying to fit in as many words following the rule as possible at the expense of the story. Here the story was still very much at the front. If anything, the times when the pattern felt a little more overdone felt more like humor than anything. These books are sweet, realistic, and showcase diversity. I love the introduction to a detective story in the first book. The stories start with some great practice of magic E such as the story about a cape and a cap. This requires the child to read carefully to see if the e is at the end. In total, there are 27 books included. As they progress they cover different vowel teams. I like the practice page at the beginning. Instead of a list of words used like many beginner readers have, this one has a little path of the words (it looks kind of like a game board!) which my son was more excited to do. Little things like that make him want to read the words, versus just a word bank. It’s a little touch but it makes a big difference with an early reader.
The stories also progress to more challenging as they go along. The prefix and suffix books are well on the way to chapter books, whereas the magic E ones have much shorter pages. I appreciated this. The order of introducing rules was not exactly the same as our full reading program, but it still worked out well having decodable early readers that slowly built up stamina for more words and fewer pictures. By the chapter books, there are full pages of text.
The chapter books were such a hit here. In particular, my son read The Time Capsule and Penny and the Dolphins so many times. Each one he went through a stage where he read the full book every night before bed. These were the first books where he read full pages of text. He loved the realistic fiction and the real pictures. Having a very young reader it can sometimes be a challenge to find books that are at his reading level but still age-appropriate content. These fit the bill!
He also loved the interactive aspect of The Time Capsule. Several of the books have something that makes them a bit interactive. Some have hidden writing that you use a red-tinted piece of plastic to reveal. The Time Capsule has some of the papers the characters are looking at in the story in pockets throughout, including a recipe, a ticket stub, and a newspaper. My son is not a reluctant reader by any means, but I would imagine these aspects make the books more engaging for reluctant readers.
Overall, we loved the games and books. Is it worth the price? I don’t know. I think so.
The reading skills set offers a large number of books and several games. The games are truly unique. I have purchased several games designed to work on phonics. These games have ranged from a very simple phonics board game at $12 to LilyPond at $34. Word Seeds, which is basically Candyland where you read cards, was $20. I felt the Lovevery board games were more innovative and fun to play than any of the other games we got. These games also felt much better made. We love Word Seeds, but our whole board has fallen apart.
As I mentioned earlier, there are 27 books included. These are softcover, not board books or hardcovers like other Lovevery books. That said, they are very good books. While there are many early reader decodables, these are pretty special. My complaint with Lovevery is always that the books are not available by themselves, but, as usual, these are not. One aspect of Lovevery is that they offer things that are not available elsewhere.
To do some rough math on the value of the set, if we placed the four games at $15 each (a very low estimate based on the market for phonics games), each book would come to $3.50. Place the board games at a more reasonable $20 and each book is $2.77. Overall, that seems very reasonable to me. The downside, of course, is you must put out the money all at once for the whole set. There is also a play guide that guides caregivers on how to introduce each piece and ideas for practicing skills. Honestly, I didn’t use this at all, which brings me to a final point.
This is not a full reading program. It is a wonderful supplement if you have children in school learning to read or you are teaching your child to read using a phonics-based reading program. The Lovevery Reading Skills set practices the rules, but it is not teaching them in a comprehensive way. Likely level 1 is more comprehensive in that way as it is pre-reading skills, but by level 2 and 3, I believe more comprehensive phonics instruction is important. If you are looking for a full reading program I highly recommend All About Reading. You can check out my review of it here!
There you go, there is my non-sponsored, non-gifted review of the Lovevery reading set.
