Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading

The updated second edition of Unlocking Literacy is here — and now pre- and inservice educators will have the very latest research and practical guidance on teaching good reading and spelling skills. Developed for general and special educators of students from prekindergarten to middle school and beyond, the new edition of this bestselling textbook arms teachers with the most recent developments in reading research and shows them how to apply their knowledge in the classroom to help all students learn.

Focusing on two interlocking skills — decoding and spelling—this textbook gets teachers ready to:

• promote students’ print awareness and phonological awareness through letter naming, letter forming, and listening and speaking activities such as poetry and play
• improve students’ spelling skills by teaching the origins of English words, Anglo-Saxon base words, Latin affixes and roots, Greek combining forms, and multisyllabic words
• help students understand and correctly use the components of the English language, including common consonant and vowel patterns, syllable patterns, common spelling rules, prefixes and suffixes, roots, nonphonetic words, and contractions
• deepen older students’ proficiency with language by introducing less common Latin roots and Greek combining forms, new words entering the English language, and lessons built around themes such as calendars and mythology

To help educators teach with confidence once they’re in the classroom, this text is packed with practical, immediately applicable material. Educators will get engaging classroom activities (including 21 NEW activities suitable for use all students, including English language learners); lesson plans incorporating multisensory, language-based instruction; samples of student work; explanations of current research; and even more websites and reference material to strengthen their instruction.

An essential text for college and university courses on reading instruction — and an ideal professional development resource for inservice educators—this new edition of a classic bestseller will help teachers unlock literacy for all their students.

Created in consultation with a language expert, this book is part of an engaging new phonics-based series, especially written to help your child learn to read. Not only is the story great fun, it also takes into account recent research on the most effective ways of teaching reading. Stephen Cartwright’s delightful illustrations complement the text and are designed to stimulate further interest.

It is a parent’s deepest heartache: watching a child struggle in life, desperate to help. When Katherine Cunningham’s daughter Tricia (“Tiger”) is diagnosed with dyslexia, roadblocks appear at every turn, and the entire family is forced to create its own solutions.

Here is a model of reading ideal for striving readers, focused on their personal interests, topic-specific reading, deep background knowledge, contextual reading strategies, and mentoring support. More important, the model moves away from a deficit approach to conceptualize striving readers in a new way. Chapters share success stories of readers who overcome their struggles and highlight instructional strategies and materials you can use to develop activities and lessons for children and adults. Use this research-based model in the classroom or at home to help your striving readers achieve high levels of literacy.

It’s report card day — the most dreaded day in Hank’s school year. And when Hank gets his grades, they’re his worst nightmare come true: a D in spelling, a D in reading, a D in math. After school, Hank and his friends go to his mom’s deli. His mom is on the prowl — she knows a report card day when she sees one. Hank tries to stall her, but she’s going for his backpack. He’s cornered. Hank hands the report card off to his friend Frankie, who gives it to his friend Ashley, who gives it to Robert, who puts it into a meat grinder! Hank watches as his Ds are ground into a big salami, and this particular salami is being made for a very important client. How will Hank get out of this one?

There was something wrong with my brain. What had previously been a shadowy suspicion that hovered on the edge of consciousness became certain knowledge the year I was nine and entered fourth grade. I seemed to be like other children, but I was not like them; I could not learn to read or spell.

In this first account of what it is like to grow up dyslexic, Eileen Simpson vividly recreates the frightening world of a child living in the limbo of illiteracy. Simpson’s lack of reading skills so exasperated her teachers and relatives that they began to think she was mentally retarded. She could get lost walking to the grocery store; at times she felt as if she had no control over her speech. It was not until she was twenty-two that her future husband, the poet John Berryman, finally named her mysterious ailment.

Simpson intersperses her narrative with nontechnical explanations of dyslexia and what is being done to treat it. But despite growing public awareness and advances in research, dyslexia remains a frustrating and frightening disorder.