Michael Levin

About Us

I am a physician specializing in behavioral, attentional and learning problems in young children. I had always wanted to recommend a book to parents of my patients but never found a suitable resource. When our daughter was four and my wife became interested in teaching her to read, and my interest in developing an easy to use, step-by-step course took a new turn.

This coming together of my professional interest and at the same time wanting to teach our daughter to read led us to creating this developmentally appropriate reading course for teaching children to read.

I have incorporated all my knowledge about children's learning and development in this program. The pages are clean, with little distraction. The material per page is limited. Child gets a feeling of accomplishment from the very first lesson by reading little stories. The techniques used combine phonics, high frequency word recognition and guided reading. We were fortunate to have some very prominent people in the field of education among our friends and who helped us liberally.

We tested the program with my patients, many of whom had severe attentional and developmental problems and I am proud to say that this program is the best for this particular group of children.

After we did the book, Charan began to work on software to go with it. The software is complementary to the book and helps to engage the child as well as provide an additional mode of learning. Our software is quite different from others in that it very comprehensive. It is entertaining but it is not edutainment.

I went to medical school at NYU, did a Pediatrics residency at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles and Cedar Sinai Hospital. I then did training in Child Psychiatry at UCLA. Currently I am in private practice in San Ramon, California where I am the Medical Director of East Bay Psychopharmacology Group and see young children for various developmental and learning problems. Previously, I was the Medical Director of the Child Development Center at UC-Irvine and have been an Asst. clinical professor in the UCLA Neuro-Psychiatric Institute and at Stanford University.

Recently I also started Pacific Cognition Center where we test and treat cognition related issues of dementia and brain changes due to various issues.

I am also the author of the Verbal Math series of books with my wife, Charan Langton. My website: http://www.ebpharm.com

Charan

My goal was simple. I just wanted a simple step-by-step program so I could teach my daughter and my son to read.

After we tried the Hooked on Phonics package, I purchased a book by Siegfried Engelmann, called "Teach your child to read in 100 easy Lessons." I didn't know it then but this is a very popular book for parents. I liked it a lot. But, I began having problems with it right away. The stories were a bit too long for my four year old. The major flaw of the book is that it completely ignores the fact that English is not 100% phonic. There are many common words that just can not be read using phonic rules. Words like, would, do, no etc. So I began to make a list of such sight words along with the lessons. I also found the scripted format of the book was confining for me. I found myself completely ignoring the scripts.I also felt that it was not necessary to have those funny looking fonts. A distorted typography as is done in this book is just not necessary.

Then one day after feeling frustrated, I said to myself, "I will do my own reading program!" And we did! Of course, it took us nearly five years to do so. Our two children, Nina and Victor who were the initial guinea pigs and hundreds of children in Michael's practice provided a ready validation of our approach. The book is now one of the best selling books in this category.

I have a day job working as an engineer. You can see my website dealing with communications engineering at www.complextoreal.com.