Rating: 
Summary: Great Book-but not the workbook
Review: I think that Carmen and Geoffrey McGuinness have hit the nail on the head when it comes to both teaching decoding skills and verbal intelligence. These books have been a great help teaching my dyslexic son to read and comprehend. I finally found a system that worked!But, the "Language Wise Support Manual" that goes with this book is pricey (about 3 times the price of the book) and unnecessary. While it might help a classroom teacher who needs worksheets that he/she can send home for the student to work on, a parent can just use notebook paper to do the activities. For example, to go with "Using Elaboration in Writing" page 234 in the book, the workbook simply as a sentence at the top of the page that says "Fill both pages on the topic of________", followed by two pages of lined paper. A great number of the pages are like this.
Rating:
Summary: If I hadn't found this book my son might not be able to read
Review: This book gave me my first insight how to overcome difficulties associated with learning to read. The phonemic breakdown of the English language is remarkably well laid out and easy to understand. The precision of the text and user friendliness helped me find my son the help he needed to read and helped me be his coach to help him not just read better but comprehend more thoroughly and accurately. He read the latest Harry Potter book - almost 900 pages - in a week. He is 10. This book helped me understand that although some kids more intuitively make comprehension decisions while reading or listening, those critical evaluation skills asscoiated with language can be optimized by practice and breaking down the process to help a child take it one step at a time.
Rating:
Summary: Bringing practice and theory together.
Review: With a plethora of ways to address reading comprehension, it is difficult as a teacher and parent to know which are really effective and why. As with Reading Reflex, the McGuinesses have led me to a deeper understanding of the familiar. The book's activites are simple and powerful and often ones that I have used before but without the accompanying understanding of why they are effective. The book is divided into two sections, the first explains the underlying theory. The second describes the activities. So many times we see activities without theory and theory without activites... here the twain have met. Understanding the logic of the activities makes them adaptable to the classroom setting. For example, there is an activity "Connections" where children are asked to relate not obviously related things. I used this as a prereading activity with a Native American myth, introducing some key elements of the story. The children generated connections and virtually predicted the story as they established relationships between a flute, a blanket and a branch. This is how understanding brain research can enlighten and strengthen our teaching practice, giving our students powerful experiences with written and spoken language. I highly recommend this book.
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