Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It: A Scientific Revolution in Reading [Paperback]

In America today, 43 percent of our children fall below grade level in reading. In her meticulously researched and groundbreaking work, Diane McGuinness faults outmoded reading systems for this crisis -- and provides the answers we need to give our children the reading skills they need. Drawing on twenty-five years of cutting-edge research, Dr. McGuinness presents bold new phoneme awareness programs that overcome the tremendous shortcomings of other systems by focusing on the crucial need to understand and hear reliably the sounds of a language before learning to read. Maintaining that any child can be taught to read fluently if given proper instruction, she dramatically reveals how dyslexia and behavior problems such as ADD stem not from neurological disorders but from flawed methods of reading instruction. With invaluable information on remedial reading programs that can correct various ineffective reading strategies, this book is a must for concerned parents, teachers, and others who want to make a difference.Diane McGuinness, Ph.D.,is a cognitive-development psychologist and Professor at the University of South Florida. The author ofWhen Children Don't Learn,she lives in Sanibel, Florida.Chapter 1: READING REPORT CARD
The Jamesons were a model middle-class family. Jim and Pat had college degrees. Jim earned good money as an engineer, and Pat had a part-time consulting job setting up computer systems for small businesses. They were devoted parents to their three children, umpiring for little league, running car pools to diving lessons, dancing lessons, and soccer practice. They valued learning and read bedtime stories every night. They often consulted dictionaries and encyclopedias whenever one of the children introduced an unfamiliar topic. Dinner conversations were lively, and filled with accounts of the children's daily activities.
Their youngest son, Donny, started kindergarten after two years at a well-run preschool. Donny could lã#