This May Be Difficult to Read: But You Really Should (for your child's sake): 1 (Education & Parenting Matters)

There's no baby Einsteins in cribs anymore, our babies can't read, and no one is still hooked on phonics - so what's left? This may be difficult to read, but we haven't been selling reading skills very well... Our society has put a premium on one single aspect of the reading process - letters & sounds (or phonics). This has given the impression that 5, 4 or even 3-year-olds can become proficient readers but there is a myriad of psychological and neurological evidence that emphatically refutes this idea.

It may be difficult to read that despite all your hard work, you have only scraped the surface of the learning and reading process with your child or, worse yet, that you may inadvertently have set your child up to fail... Although it may appear that even very young children can "read" words out loud (or decode), those same children often experience great difficulty extracting meaning from the printed word as they move through middle school, high school or college. Their reading skills may superficially sustain them initially, but the sad reality remains that 1 in 5 college students has to take a remedial reading class in their freshman year.

This May Be Difficult to Read creates the opportunity for you to go back in time to think as a child thinks and read as a child reads. Engage in the fun, interactive examples, read the anecdotal evidence and participate in the research studies to experience reading as your child does. Armed with this new perspective, together, let's take reading into the 21st century and reinvent the reading process...

Learn about brain development and the 5 comprehension skills that 5, 4 and even 3-year-olds should be focusing on instead of fixating on letters, sounds and rote memorization.

Engage in 15 research studies within the book so that you can experience what your child may encounter as an early reader. This will shed some light on the many reading failures that occur throughout our educational system and help your child to avoid them.

Follow the fun, 4-stage reading program to open up a world of sustainable literacy for your child that will focus on extracting meaning from the printed word.

Let's use our understanding of the human brain to maximize our children's learning potential while simultaneously optimizing our precious time with our children as we create a "need to read" in their daily life. Transform your home into a developmentally appropriate ecosystem and make reading part of your daily routine with fun, easy and engaging child-centered interactions.

In our harried lives, somewhere between work, dinnertime, bath-time, laundry and house cleaning, we parents deserve to have more fun with our children!

As parents, we have high hopes for our children. And rightly so, but children don't beep like a microwave when they are ready to learn! They also don't signal the amount that they have learned like your car's gas gauge measures your gas level! So why not apply some sound psychological research to bolster their success and put your mind at ease.

Since reading is the linchpin of all future learning, it's time to disrupt an educational paradigm that hasn't shifted in 50 years. It's time to reinvent reading!

Remember, their brains are different from our brains. They don't think, speak, or learn like we do. Let's learn from their perspective so we can appreciate why "this may be difficult to read" ...

Given that this is a book about you and your children, you might be wondering, who do I think I am and why should you listen to a word that I say? Well, I'm a cognitive, developmental psychologist. I've taught in the classroom for over 30 years, and I've raised three of my own children! I've seen the struggle firsthand. I've watched my children (and possibly your children) succeed and fail with phonics, reading, reading comprehension, and learning. I've seen our collective children hurting and I've also seen them succeed beyond their wildest dreams. I have such a passion for watching them develop a love for reading and learning that I wanted to share it with you.I earned my PhD from Stony Brook University in 1994 and I have been teaching and raising children ever since! I have marveled at the educational successes and failures of my own three children (the last of whom is now off to university).I have also been teaching at my local community college for over 20 years, and while I have seen many of my students succeed, I have also watched some of them struggle badly with the printed word. These are clearly highly verbal students, but their reading comprehension skills sell them short in the classroom. Granted, textbooks aren't easy to read - they are often packed full of facts that develop concepts at a staggering pace - but how were these students prepared for college-level reading? What was their early childhood experience? Will your child be one of the success stories or will your child struggle with textbooks and comprehending the printed word? Remember, reading doesn't end with knowing your ABCs. That's just the beginning of the reading process.This book is about success! This book is about inspiring the greatest number of children to love reading and the comprehension process so that they can't wait to pick up a book or dive into a textbook (that might be a tad too optimistic, but you get the point...).Aside from my work in the classroom, I have given lectures around the country, published magazine articles, served as an "Ask the Expert" for Texas Family Magazine, edited books for McGraw Hill, worked as a consultant for Relay/GSE, and presented workshops and lectures for the "Distinguished Speaker Series" and the Child Care Councils of Suffolk and Nassau County, New York.