Page 10 - TRWW Book One

INTRODUCTION

What Does the Book Do? For Whom Is It Designed? How Comprehensive Is It?

Not dumbed down, The Red Well-Read Reader combines phonics and the Look and Say methods,
providing a step-by-step, hard and fast superior method to teach children how to read and to

comprehend what they read. What’s more, its many stories make the task thought provoking
and fun–fun to teach and fun to learn. The book is fun because page after page it plays with

language. The stories are purely didactic, and therefore can be read over and over again for
edification and pleasure.

Although foremost a reader, it is also a vocabulary builder and a speller. The Red Well-Read

Reader is so efficacious that it can teach all these subjects independent of all other materials.
However, like other reading texts, it should be used in conjunction with a wide array of

literature. Proficiency of the material in this text should not be viewed as an end in and of
itself, but as a catalyst that propels students into a higher orbit of learning.

When through with this book, children should have sufficient skill to decode, i.e. to read, almost

anything and make sense of articles written on a much higher level than most of their peers can
expect to reach. Because this book contains nearly every one-syllable word in the lexicon and

because a large portion of these words is used in the context of the many stories–students will
be expanding their vocabulary prodigiously. If vocabulary is a measure of intelligence and of

success, as it is acknowledged to be, this feature is indeed quite significant. As a reader and a
vocabulary builder, this book defies the trend of a controlled, limited vocabulary, leapfrogging

over basal readers that teach to the least apt and slowest students. Moreover, unlike basal
readers containing vapid subject matter, this book has many challenging stories designed to

stretch students’ thinking ability to the fullest. While its stories are challenging to the
brightest students, they are never threatening or overwhelming to the slower students. All

students benefit in diverse ways, each according to his or her respective ability.

Any child from–say six years of age to adulthood–may be taught by The Read Well-Read Reader .
Even younger children may be weaned on it. The only prerequisite is that the student has some

familiarity with such common words as mom, dad, who, which, is, are, good, bad, you, I, should,
love and so on.

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