The Beginning Reading Handbook: Strategies for Success

If you have already purchased The Beginning Reading Handbook and want to access the downloadable, ready-to-use, versions of the parent letters included with the book, click here.

If you're looking for one comprehensive book featuring the best strategies for teaching reading, then your search has ended. Throughout The Beginning Reading Handbook, the emphasis is on the numerous, specific strategies that can be easily implemented with young children - not only to make learning to read a truly joyous experience, but to help build a strong foundation that will lead to long-term success in school.

Gail Heald-Taylor uses literature as the foundation for instruction. That is, everything - comprehension, the study of sentences, words, and phonics, etc. - is conducted within the context of good literature, via contextual instruction and learning. Certain strategies show you how to help children understand stories by reading to and with them before expecting them to read alone. Other strategies help draw children's attention to features of print - such as sentences, phrases, and words - as they read and reread familiar, predictable-pattern literature by reading in unison with the teacher, reading together with other children, reading with partners, and then reading alone. Also, you are shown how to encourage children to use phonics in effective ways and how to use guided reading to pave the way for independent reading. Each activity stands alone so that you can use them in any order and at any time.

The Beginning Reading Handbook also includes examples of children's work, an informal reading test to determine a child's reading phase, a list of literature selections, a developmental reading behavior inventory, and a helpful seventy-three-term glossary. Numerous ready-to-use letters to parents can be downloaded for free by purchasers of the book.