My grandson truly loves the Abeka material! The pictures are big, colorful and inviting!

I was introduced to this curriculum when my older children were in a Christian preschool. They became wonderful readers. I have used this four times now. Abeka phonics is top-notch. I didn't make my son color the pictures, but the girls loved the coloring!

I love the ABeka learning program and everything that comes with it! After 6 years of homeschooling, I have not found another curriculum that can compare to the quality and value of their materials. With that being said, this book was a little frustrating for me as a first time homeschooler of a 4 year old child. The title of the book says, "ABC-123, K4 Phonics and Numbers" so you would think they would be learning the beginning phonetic sounds of the alphabet starting with this book. Unfortunately, ABeka, like most other homeschooling programs start beginning letter recognition and pronounciation at age 3 so that by age 4 they are ready to move on to more advanced concepts.

In this book, the first 33 pages are devoted to counting with 4 of those pages being a coloring picture about the letters, i, u, e, a, and o. Then on page 35 it starts to teach middle vowel sounds with multiple choice pictures that match the vowel displayed. On the back of each page, there a is a letter and vowel blend chart going up a ladder such as la, le, lo, lu, li. This pattern continues all the way through the book until page 165 when it starts using 3 letter word recognition and pronounciation. This book is much more advanced at the K4 level than most other curriclums we have tried so you really need to know ahead of time what to expect coming into it. We also bought the teacher's manual for this but did not use it in the end because the books include instructions on every page without them.

My advice to anyone wanting to start the Abeka program before 1st or 2nd grade would be to start with the Letters & Sounds for 3s book and drill on those letter sounds for as long as possible until they are grounded in beginning phonetic sounds and basic letter recognition and understanding. This is what happened to us when we first started this program and we lost a lot of time and money trying to find other ways to bridge the gap with other curriculums and resources when ABeka already had everything we needed. I hope that our experience can be helpful to someone else and God bless. :)

This is a great book to use alone or with the rest of the k4 cirriculum. I have used it for my 3 oldest children and am now ordering it for my 4th child. The pics are fun and colorful, and my kids have enjoyed doing a page or two a day without too much help. Even those with short attention spans will have no trouble with this and its great prep for the next year.