Reading Skills Books

The Read-Aloud Handbook: Sixth Edition (Read-Aloud Handbook)

Jim Trelease

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 63 new & used starting at $6.99

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 81 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great guidelines 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Suggested by our daughter's teacher. Wish we could adhere to the guidelines regularly. The argument is sound and definitely gave us food for thought about how we teach our kids to relate to books and think about the written word. Recommended if you wish to share your passion with reading with your kids.

This is the book! What's more important than reading?! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book is appropriate for every caring parent. I am a homeschooling mother of three and I can't recommend it highly enough. After reading the library's copy I had to buy my own copy, plus several for friends and family members who have kids. It is full of high-quality info and ideas about reading to children, and about them ultimately reading to themselves. There is also an organized and valuable "recommended books" list in the back. Wonderful!

Editorial Review:

For more than two decades, millions of parents and educators have turned to Jim Trelease’s beloved classic to help countless children become avid readers through awakening their imaginations and improving their language skills. Now this new edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook imparts the benefits, rewards, and importance of reading aloud to children of a new generation. Supported by delightful anecdotes as well as the latest research, The Read- Aloud Handbook offers proven techniques and strategies—and the reasoning behind them— for helping children discover the pleasures of reading and setting them on the road to becoming lifelong readers.

Critical Reading Workbook for the SAT (Critical Reading Workbook for the Sat)

Sharon Weiner Green, Mitchel Weiner

Amazon Price: $10.19 List Price: $14.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Barron's Educational Series Amazon Marketplace: 61 new & used starting at $7.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent practice tests and vocabulary 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Obviously, this book can not be your only guide to the SAT;it only covers a third of it. But it does a very thorough job with the Critical Reading section. The sentence completion practice tests (4 tests per set, 3 different difficulty level sets) are very close to the real College Board ones. The reading comprehension pieces are decent; nothing amazing, but as good as close to the real SAT as you can find.

The most valuable part of this book (for the average person), is the comprehensive vocabulary list. It consists of 800 words (80 sets of 10 words). Being very familiar with the actual SAT, I can say that the words on the list are indeed very high-frequency SAT words. If you know every word on that list it would be hard to answer more than 2 sentence completion questions incorrectly on the real SAT. For the vocabulary list alone, the book is worth the buy.

Editorial Review:

Concentrating on the Critical Reading section of the newly structured SAT college entrance exam, this test-preparation workbook presents tips, questions, answers, and answer explanations for the section’s two main question types—sentence completion questions and reading comprehension questions—as well as extensive vocabulary review. Both the sentence completion and the reading comprehension exercises are organized according to level of difficulty and presented in three sections, labeled from A to C. Students who master Level C in both parts are well on the road to achieving a high Critical Reading score when they take the actual SAT. This new workbook replaces Barron's Verbal Workbook for the New SAT, 11th Edition.

Breakthrough Rapid Reading

Peter Kump

Amazon Price: $11.53 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Prentice Hall Press Amazon Marketplace: 45 new & used starting at $8.25

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 46 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A previous National Director of Education for Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics presents his do-it-yourself program for increasing reading speed and boosting comprehension.

"Speed reading is one of the truly useful educational ideas of the last few years, and this book can be the least expensive and most efficient way you can learn it." --William Proxmire, United States Senator

The perfect answer to today's information explosion, Peter Kump's rapid reading method has already helped thousands of people to read up to eight times faster, with better concentration and retention.

This program brings together the best of what classroom speed reading courses have to offer, and distills fundamental principles and skills that can be learned at home with the help of the drills and exercises provided. And because it lets readers choose their own material and set their own pace, it's the ideal method for busy people juggling a full schedule.

Breakthrough Rapid Reading makes conquering information overload a reality. So whether it's cutting down on that backlog of business reports and technical matter or scaling that mountain of newspapers and leisure reading, getting up to speed is only a matter of time and practice.

Words Their Way: Word Sorts for Within Word Pattern Spellers (2nd Edition) (Words Their Way Series)

Marcia Invernizzi, Francine Johnston, Donald R. Bear, Shane R. Templeton

Amazon Price: $17.99 List Price: $19.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Prentice Hall Amazon Marketplace: 35 new & used starting at $14.83

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This supplemental book expands and enriches the practical, research-based and classroom proven way to study words with students, specifically Word Pattern spelling. Notes for the Teacher, Organizational tips, and follow-up activities all assist teachers and future teachers to begin using word sorts with minimal preparation and to easily reinforce previous word sort skills as students learn and build new ones. Designed for use as part of a reading curriculum where word pattern spelling is covered, topics provide step-by-step instructions on how to introduce and guide students through the sorting lesson. The free Words Their Way CD-ROM supplement is loaded with extra pdf files of games, word sorts, word lists, and game boards providing ready to print activities for new teachers. The Companion Website provides a resource for additional spelling inventories for grades 1-3, resources for using word sorts with ELL learners, and links to related word study websites. Designed for use as part of a reading curriculum where word pattern spelling is covered.

Words Their Way: Word Sorts for Letter Name - Alphabetic Spellers (2nd Edition) (Words Their Way Series)

Francine Johnston, Donald R. Bear, Marcia Invernizzi, Shane R. Templeton

Amazon Price: $17.99 List Price: $19.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Prentice Hall Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $13.07

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

We believe that the hands-on word sorting approach to word study is invaluable to you and your students. Broaden your word study understanding and instruction with this expanded word sorting tool for week by week implementation with Letter Name-Alphabetic spellers (Grades K - 3). This stage-specific companion volume to Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction provides a complete curriculum of reproducible sorts and detailed directions for the teacher working with students in the letter name-alphabetic stage of spelling. This second edition boasts *Literature Connections making links between features being studies and valuable children's literature *Targeted Learners sections that clarify which students will benefit most from the instruction *Spell Checks and other Assessments available more frequently throughout *High Frequency Words receive special attention Responses from the field! A strength of each chapter is the Notes for the Teacher section that introduces each set of sorts. This reminds teachers about developmental appropriateness and pacing variations based on learner needs.Clearly the gradual release of responsibility model of guided instruction is promoted and reinforced throughout the text. Barbara Pettegrew, Otterbein College Chapter layout is excellent. Format is designed to include anything that might be needed for the lesson, and each takes you step by step through the process being taught, allowing time for students to internalize and firm up the skills and strategies. Susan K. McCloskey, California State University, Fresno Meet the Authors *Francine Johnston is Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she teaches reading, language arts, and children's literature. A former first-grade teacher and reading specialist. *Marcia Invernizzi is Director of the McGuffey Reading Center at the University of Virginia exploring developmental universals in non-English orthographies. A former English and reading teacher, Marcia works with children experiencing difficulties learning to read and write in intervention programs such as Virginia's Early Intervention Reading Initiative and Book Buddies *Donald Bear is Director of the E.L.Cord Foundation Center for Learning and Literacy at the University of Nevada, Reno, assessing and teaching students who experience difficulties learning to read and write. A former preschool and elementary teacher, Donald currently researches literacy development with a special interest in students who speak languages other than English, and he partners with schools and districts to consider assessment and literacy instruction. *Shane Templeton is Foundation Professor of Literacy Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. A former classroom teacher at the primary and secondary levels, he researches the development of orthographic and vocabulary knowledge.

Words Their Way Word Sorts for Syllables and Affixes Spellers (2nd Edition) (Words Their Way Series)

Francine Johnston, Marcia Invernizzi, Donald R. Bear, Shane R. Templeton

Amazon Price: $17.99 List Price: $19.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Prentice Hall Amazon Marketplace: 29 new & used starting at $15.29

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Words Their Way companion volumes, 2e We believe that the hands-on word sorting approach to word study is invaluable to you and your students. These stage-specific companion volumes to Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction provide a complete curriculum of reproducible sorts and detailed directions for the teacher working with students in each stage of spelling development, from emergent through derivational relations. NEW! All second editions boast *Literature Connections making links between features being studies and valuable children's literature *Targeted Learners sections that clarify which students will benefit most from the instruction *Spell Checks and other Assessments available more frequently throughout *High Frequency Words receive special attention This collection of word sorting activities is for students who are in the syllables and affixes stage of spelling development, typically intermediate or advanced readers and writers (Grades 3 to 8). These students are ready to study multi-syllabic words--beginning with consonant doubling, plural endings and moving through the study of basic prefixes and suffixes.The sorts in this collection present 24 words each week, selected according to their frequency of occurrence in reading materials and allowing students to discover spelling generalizations or to compare syllable juncture features and patterns.

Comprehension Connections: Bridges to Strategic Reading

Tanny McGregor

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Deepen your understanding of Comprehension Connections. Listen to Tanny McGregor's three Webinars, archived here for use with professional learning groups of any size:

Click here to access the webinars now http://www.heinemann.com/mcgregorwebinar/

Inferring, questioning, determining importance. It's not easy to explain these abstract reading strategies to elementary readers, yet knowing how they work and how to use them is an important first step to connecting with texts. Fortunately Tanny McGregor has developed visual, tangible, everyday lessons that make abstract thinking concrete and that can help every child in your classroom make more effective use of reading comprehension strategies.

Comprehension Connections is a guide to developing children's ability to fully understand texts by making the comprehension process achievable, accessible, and incremental. McGregor's approach sequences stages of learning for each strategy that take students from a fun object lesson to a nuanced and lasting understanding. Her lessons build bridges between the concrete and the abstract by incorporating writing, discussion, song, art, and movement into a web of creative connections that reinforce each strategy on a variety of levels. All the while Comprehension Connections offers an inside look at the dynamic of McGregor's teaching, showing you how her ideas look in action, and including the language she uses and that she encourages her students to use as they build their facility with:

• schema
• inferring
• questioning
• determining importance
• visualizing
• synthesizing.

Many students struggle to understand what it is they are supposed to do as they learn to read strategically. Help them make connections to the ideas behind reading and watch as your readers go deeper into texts than ever before.

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Maryanne Wolf

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A must for any teacher 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I am not a professional reviewer, so in simple terms... this writer does an excellent job of covering the history of writing and reading. She makes it interesting, even if you don't like history. She does an excellent job on the science of how the brain works regarding reading. Again, she does an excellent job even if you don't like science.

I believe this is a must have for any teacher. To understand how minds work and how reading and the brain really go together. It is a very interesting book and you will learn a lot from it.

Editorial Review:

"Human beings were never born to read," writes Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and child development expert Maryanne Wolf. Reading is a human invention that reflects how the brain rearranges itself to learn something new. In this ambitious, provocative book, Wolf chronicles the remarkable journey of the reading brain not only over the past five thousand years, since writing began, but also over the course of a single child's life, showing in the process why children with dyslexia have reading difficulties and singular gifts.

Lively, erudite, and rich with examples, Proust and the Squid asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians was a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy. The potential transformations in this changed reading brain, Wolf argues, have profound implications for every child and for the intellectual development of our species.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Speed Reading (Complete Idiot's Guide to)

Abby Marks Beale, Pam Mullan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent Speed Reading Book!! 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful.

I've bought speed reading software (Speed Reader X: Speed Reading Made Easy) in the past and found it quite disappointing. Yes, you DO learn how to read faster with comprehension, but you are limited on what you learn.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Speed Reading is extremely helpful in learning MANY new methods to speed reading. It's up to date to include speed reading on-screen, and offers many tips on increasing your comprehension as well. You'll learn to try out many methods to keep pace (single-finger, multiple-finger, card), and, with experimentation, can figure out which method works best for you. You also learn about picking out key words to get the main idea, while skipping the smaller, less-important words (filler). Or, if that method doesn't work well for you, there's always "though-chunking," reading words as groups. This method works best for me, and increased my reading speed because my eyes stop on 3 or 4 points per line instead of stopping to read each word in a 13-word line. In a sense, you're stretching your peripheral vision to read more than one word at a time. And the book offers many exercises on improving that.

There are a number of sample readings for you to practice on, along with space to keep track of your progress. This is very helpful to boost motivation and confidence, which the book points out is very helpful in making progress. If you feel and know you can speed read, then you will. The book offers a number of tips and strategies on how to remain focused while you read, where the best (and worst) places to read are, and how to give your eyes a rest.

I've just finished reading this book and continue to practice, practice, practice everyday. That is ESSENTIAL in learning a new method. With the tips I've learned in this book I was able to increase my reading speed from 235 WPM (words per minute, an average reader), to 390 WPM with about 80% comprehension, the same as I would get with my normal speed. I was able to read Johnny Got His Gun, a 320 page novel, in 2 days, something that might have taken me over a week with my normal reading. And I understood it all. A great book.

Bottom line:
Get this book if you really want to learn how to speed read. It DOES take practice, but you WILL get results.

Editorial Review:

On your marks, get set, read!

Most adults today are working with antiquated skills and ingrained beliefs about their reading abilities, or lack thereof. But with the tips and examples offered in The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Speed Reading, getting through a load of must-do reading doesn’t have to be an arduous or overwhelming chore. The strategies are surprisingly simple once revealed. With practice, readers will not only speed through and understand books, articles, and professional journals but will also build their personal reading confidence and competence.

• Written by a reading specialist
• Useful for students, business people, lawyers, doctors
• Includes how-to strategies as well as practice timed readings
• Tips for reading on paper and onscreen

Mosaic of Thought, Second Edition: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction

Ellin Oliver Keene, Susan Zimmermann

Amazon Price: $26.55 List Price: $29.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Heinemann Amazon Marketplace: 41 new & used starting at $24.78

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Mosiac of Thought Online Course available to all adopters of 25 copies or more of Mosaic of Thought, Second Edition.

Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann have returned with a new edition of Mosaic of Thought that features 70 percent new material. When the first edition published ten years ago, Mosaic of Thought became a runaway best seller as the first book to explicitly describe the use and benefits of strategy-based comprehension instruction. Since then comprehension strategy instruction has exploded, leading to numerous inspiring variations on Mosaic's instructional principles, as well as a widening of the comprehension research base. Now the second edition offers up-to-the-minute insight for classroom teachers, literacy coaches, and school leaders everywhere, and reminds everyone of precisely what effective, long-lasting comprehension teaching looks like.

Mosaic of Thought, Second Edition, has been carefully revised and reflects Keene and Zimmermann's latest thinking. It's designed to help teachers implement practical, thoughtful ideas for teaching comprehension in contemporary classrooms through the seven core strategies that successful readers use to engage with texts. 

Packed with new classroom examples, grounded in the latest research, and written in the same accessible tone as the first edition, reaffirms the essential elements of powerful comprehension teaching introduced in the first edition while adding and updating features, including:

• Key Ideas sections for each strategy that describe crucial comprehension concepts
• new classroom examples that show comprehension strategies put into action in dynamic, literature-rich, current classrooms
• new opening vignettes that illustrate the concepts students will learn through explorations of the thinking used by proficient adult readers
• new tools to help teachers create effective reader's workshops
• innovations from teachers around the country for fine tuning think-alouds and conferring practices
• new advice on long-term instructional planning.

Keene and Zimmermann have also created an invaluable Q-and-A section with smart, informed responses to the questions that today's teachers most frequently ask about strategy-based teaching.

 

Whether you are just now joining the hundreds of thousands of teachers who have made Keene and Zimmermann their central resource for comprehension teaching, or whether you've relied on their advice for years, Mosaic of Thought, Second Edition, will change your literacy instruction - and possibly your own reading - forever. It's filled with vital, new information, new research, and proven practices. Read it today and give your students strategies for connecting with texts that will last a lifetime.