As a member of the TOS Homeschool Crew I received a free year membership to AVKO Educational Research Foundation in order to review their benefits to its members.

Founded by Don McCabe, AVKO is a non-profit organization that focuses on providing resources for teaching dyslexics how to read, write, spell and keyboard. Even though it concentrates on readers who have learning disabilities, others can also benefit from what they have to offer through their membership.

The following is AVKO’s Mission Statement taken directly from their website.

Mission Statement

The AVKO Educational Research Foundation, founded in 1974, has as its mission the following:

1. To determine what makes the learning of reading and spelling so difficult for some and so easy for others.
2. To determine what it is about our language that good readers learn without being taught that poor readers don’t.
3. To determine whether or not that which poor readers don’t learn is ever systematically taught and if it isn’t, if it can be.
4. To devise techniques and materials to enable teachers (or parents) to systematically teach poor readers and/or poor spellers that which schools presently are not teaching.
5. To widely disseminate its discoveries of techniques and materials that enable dyslexics to learn to read and to spell.

At the AVKO website, nonmembers can experience some of what they offer through the freebies they have available. You can get a feel for whether or not a membership would benefit your children. AVKO has a freebies page where you can view some articles and other materials

Though I am not reviewing the specific materials from AVKO, I can tell you that they offer a lot of good resources to you when you become a member. You receive discounts on AVKO printed materials, access to audios of workshops, hundreds of dollars of FREE e-books that you can download in PDF format, the availability of Pretests and Placement Tests as well as other supplemental curriculum resources.
There are two levels of membership available: basic ($25/year)and deluxe ($100/year).
You can read the full benefits for each membership level from the AVKO website at http://www.avko.org/membership.html.

I also encourage you to read what other TOS Homeschool Members have to say about AVKO from our Crew blog here.

Filed under: Home, TOS Crew by Barbara
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