Unlocking Literacy: Effective Decoding and Spelling Instruction, Second Edition

The media could not be loaded.  I have read a lot of literacy books. I am a homeschool mother with a struggling reader and speller. He has made much progress with the Orrin Gillingham Blast Off to Reading Book (about $30 off Amazon). He is not Dyslexic but ADHD. He’s below reading 2 grades below where he should be, which is why I took him out of school. Back to the book: This book helped me understand how children learn to read, the science behind it, the building blocks of it, and the background of the English language (which surprisingly wasn’t boring). I’d highly recommend to any teacher, parent, or caregiver of a student learning to read or a struggling reader.

This book breaks down and explains the English language, decoding & spelling. It has several pages of activities and lessons for various grade levels that can be found at the end of most of the chapters. Great for reading teachers to help explain the rules of spelling and deciding!

Amazing and eye open ring about the Science of reading! A must read for teachers! Comes with activities as well!

Excellent resource and very easy to go back and find things I need to refer to when planning my lessons.

"Unlocking Literacy" is a valuable book for elementary and middle school teachers, as well as for parents who home school and for parents of dyslexic children. It is based on the multi-sensory Orton-Gillingham approach, which stresses the central importance of an awareness of letter-sound correspondences, along with the regular, logical nature of spelling. Teachers of younger students will appreciate Henry's sensible approach to the teaching of decoding (reading), while teachers of older elementary and middle school students will find in this book a detailed approach to teaching Greek and Latin combining forms, roots, prefixes, and suffixes.There are two particularly useful components of this book. The first is Henry's incorporation of sample lessons in say, the teaching of a particular sound (-ch versus -tch, for example) or a particular Latin root. The second is a series of valuable appendices that list all of those Latin and Greek forms, along with the words derived from them.This book is part reference, part plea. I've mentioned the reference part above; the plea Henry makes is for a systematic, regular approach to teaching spelling. Such teaching often drops away after the early grades, but Henry's book will convince you that regular spelling instruction, with a solid emphasis on Greek and Latin roots in the late elementary and middle school grades, is not only desirable but logical, sensible ---and do-able.M. Feldman

Marcia Henry is a great reading teacher who knows her stuff. This book explains the rationale behind how she teaches reading. I use the curriculum she designed too, called Patterns for Success in Reading and Spelling, consisting of reproducible lesson plans, workbooks, and flash cards,  Patterns for Success in Reading and Spelling (Complete Kit)  which I bought from her publisher. I use it for freelance reading tutoring. This book is a great companion to the curriculum.

A resource I have used that is most helpful. All the lists...yeah. Vocabulary words... yes. A GREAT book. I recommended it to all my colleagues and they were impressed with it as well. I wish my school had money to buy this book for me instead of me having to purchase it. Although I must say it was money well spent. I use it a lot.

I needed this book for a college class. It arrived quickly and exactly as described.

I LOVE this book. It makes the point that REAL reading is not just phonics, and that in addition to a range of other strategies, an understanding of where words come from and their meanings, can make all the difference. Wonderful!

This a brilliant and comprehensive book which should be in all literacy teachers' library. It will help all those teachers who want to learn more and so help their students learn more successfully because there is a lot of detail written in an accessible way.

Every English teacher needs this book.