Very Good Homework BookKumon Reading 2 is a homework book that is suitable for children who are studying the KS1 curriculum to practise phonics and reading comprehensions. I found its no stress “step-by-step” slowly but firmly approach helps my sons, who doesn’t like writing much, to improve his skills. The attractive illustrations and colourful pages makes doing homework less painful. I found this book a good introduction workbook.The book has 36 exercises. The first half of the book (exercise 1-26) is a review of vowels, consonants, compound words, synonyms, plurals, sequence and who/when/where/why/what. Then from Exercise 27 onwards, the book deals with reading comprehensions.Similar to Kumon Grade 1 Reading book, the answers required for the Reading comprehensions were in “fill-in-the-blank” sentences style with key answers blank out, and the rest of sentences already printed. For example:Question: Is the character a boy or a girl?Answer: The character is a _____. (The child needs to write the actual answer: boy.)I feel that this makes learning process less stressful for beginners as it requires writing the key part of the answers only but yet they could gain ideas of how to answer questions properly in sentence format. My son certainly benefited from it. He likes working on Kumon Reading Workbook range much better than others.The only thing I don’t really like about Kumon Reading book range is that it suffers the problem of having American contents. Like the Kumon Word Problem range in Maths, I need to check the wordings on the exercises and reading material before letting my son working on it. A couple of such examples are: (1) a story is based on some basic knowledge of Baseball, and (2) it uses the word FALL rather than Autumn. For this reason, it can only be used as a complimentary workbook to the other UK workbooks such as Collins and Schofield & Sims.
