A cheerful, easy-to-use volume that offers practical help to those who teach dyslexic children.
In this workbook for teaching reading skills to dyslexic students, Graham (Many Voices, Many Choices, 2013) and her dyslexic daughter, Alta, offer a variety of approaches and activities.
The authors provide a succinct, clear explanation of dyslexia, which affects about 10 percent of the population: “a pattern of brain organization and information processing” that causes people to see overall patterns in a nonlinear way and can therefore affect their ability to read. The Grahams recommend using their teaching methods after a phonics-centered effort has failed. “After all,” they write, “Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic children learn to read without phonics.” Their tone is matter-of-fact and optimistic, and they stress that children should enjoy everything related to reading. Although the Grahams note that their activities may be done in any order, they begin with basic skills such as memory and reasoning, as well as the important skill of “tracking,” or “looking at the words as tutor reads aloud.” They advise readers to watch a song performed on YouTube while tracking the lyrics on the screen (“Tracking just got cool,” they write). They also address “scanning,” or looking at larger sections of text, and silent reading. They provide an excellent chapter on “self-generated stories,” in which a student tells a story as the tutor writes it down, either on a computer screen or on paper, using different colors, letter sizes and typefaces. Students can then practice reading using the newly created material. If tutors find that teaching the connection between symbols and sounds is too difficult, the Grahams propose an “alternative path” of “bypassing sound” by simply letting a student read silently and answer questions to test comprehension. The book concludes with a “conversation” in which a student remarks, “I’ve had millions of lessons and I still can’t read.” A tutor responds that “lots of students...learned to read when they were taught the right way.” The authors also intersperse experts’ and adult dyslexics’ short comments throughout the book.
A cheerful, easy-to-use volume that offers practical help to those who teach dyslexic children.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477649220
Page Count: 130
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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