Reading Instruction That Works: The Case for Balanced Teaching

Some strategies are effective and efficient, and others are not. Those that are both effective and efficient share characteristics that fall into three categories: content features, design features, and usefulness features. The content of the strategy refers to its steps and what they are designed to facilitate during the learning process. The design features refer to how the steps are packaged to facilitate learning and subsequent use of the strategy. The usefulness feature refers to the potential transferability of the strategy to everyday needs in a variety of settings. Ellis and Lenz (1987) identified a number of critical features across these dimensions.

This anthology of poetry is organized to show the experience of a person who takes charge of her own life despite difficulties and challenges. Fifty-three poems and three short stories describe the experience of growing up. The author, a women who wrote these poems during her childhood and teenage years, experienced a difference currently called by many names; specific learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and dylexia. She was in an ordinary class and received virtually no help for the challenges she experienced due to her handicaps.The poetry was published in journals of poetry, newspapers, and magazines when she was a teenager. Mountain Books asked the author to organize these poems into an anthology because the publisher believed they should be shared with today’s readers. They inspire and emmpower all people who have stuggled to overcome these difficulties. They sensitize parents and teachers who work to help children and adults who struggle. They show personal growth and encourage the reader to take responsibility for their own actions and experiences.

This book is filled with the strategies, supports, and interventions that have been found to be the most effective in minimizing the problems and optimizing the success of children and teens with ADHD. In addition, the easy-to-use 8 1/2 x 11 lay-flat format is filled with reproducible checklists, forms, tools, and resources.

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.

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.

This book deals with visual thinkers and computer data visualization, neurological research and gifted persons with learning difficulties — examining the role of visual-spatial strengths and verbal weaknesses in the lives of ten historical persons, including Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Sir Winston Churchill, Gen. George Patton and William Butler Yeats.

In the Mind’s Eye was selected as one of the “Outstanding Academic Books of 1998” by Choice magazine, a publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries of the American Library Association. In January 1999, the book was designated as among the “best of the best” for 1998, being among 13 books in the psychology category recommended for inclusion in college and university libraries. Selection for the award is based on “overall excellence in presentation and scholarship, importance relative to other literature in the field, distinction as a first treatment.”