"Miss" Maggie's Fun Guide to Reading By Maggie Bradseth Corley Printing Company www.corleyprinting.com 3777 Rider Trail South St Louis, MO 63045 800-835-2647 If you have a pre-reader or a beginning reader, you'll love this book! It's absolutely packed full of information for children from birth until they're reading fluently. "Miss Maggie" takes you on an informational and fun journey of teaching literacy skills--with the goal being life-long readers. With many years of teaching literacy under her belt, Miss Maggie encourages you that reading begins at birth and includes skills such as language development, comprehension, phonetic awareness, and scribble writing. By simply talking and reading to your young child out of pure enjoyment, you are helping them to set a firm foundation for reading skills. This "emergent reader" stage takes place from birth through about age 5. As children enter the reading phase, they begin to understand the phonetic sounds, rhymes, letter formations, and word decoding. Eventually, they put all those things together to read fluently. This stage typically occurs between ages 6 and 10. Miss Maggie is a firm believer that "children who start out behind may never catch up." She points to things such as too much television and not enough family interaction as risk factors for a child falling behind. That's why the first part of the book is dedicated to creating meaningful family time and motivating children to read. The author strongly encourages the use of manipulatives and games. She also says that parents have the power to instill a love of reading by simply making books a part of everyday life. The next section of the book is written in phases--from early literacy all the way through fluency. Each phase is loaded with ideas for teaching and enhancing a particular skill. The practical, easy-to-implement activities are very hands-on or game-like. In other words, they're fun! As the parent, you get to choose which activities you'd like to implement in your homeschool. The book is written in such a way that it supports your teaching, rather than setting a schedule or sequence of activities. For example, in Phase 4 (Letters & Signs Everywhere), there is a section of letter games targeted for 3 to 5-year-olds. There are 16 concisely written activities from which to choose. Here are three of the choices: an ABC song game, finding objects that start with certain letters, and an upper/lowercase matching game. The parent chooses the activities based on what needs the most attention at the moment. At the end of the 80-page book, there is a short list of further resources and a page of laminated manipulatives that go along with a few of the activity ideas in the book. I found Miss Maggie to be an excellent teacher! Personally, I appreciate when others don't waste my time with too much information. Miss Maggie gives a bit of instruction about the "why's" of the teaching methods, but then she gets down to business with ideas, ideas, ideas! The activity ideas are meaningful too. They don't require too much preparation time, and they get straight to the point. Even as a seasoned teacher, I found this to be a great resource! I also think it could be of utmost help to those who have questions about literacy development. For anyone looking to teach reading in a thorough yet non-worksheet sort of way, this book fits the bill perfectly. Even if you only have babies, this book is still appropriate for you. But especially if you have an elementary student who's a struggling reader, I believe you will find the ideas invaluable. Product review by Cindy West, The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, LLC, February 2008

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The author stresses the importance of the first six years in a child's life, as that is the time of the fastest growth physically, mentally, and spiritually. The belief that everyone working with children should see himself or herself as a teacher is evident throughout the book. The book emphasizes the necessity of controlling how time is spent in the home, with an entire chapter devoted to limiting television viewing. Presented in ten separate phases, the program encourages reading aloud, discusses proper environment, includes hands-on activities and games, shares tips for working with children with special needs, provides internet links, and emphasizes modeling behavior to achieve the best results. The phases break down the material and information into manageable portions that can be implemented readily in both a school and home environment. Included are vowel games, phonemic activities, phonics rules, blends and digraphs, and more. The book concludes with a chapter filled with ideas to encourage children to write and then lists helpful Internet resources, most of which we verified and found helpful.

'Miss' Maggie references teaching moral boundaries and using Bible stories and quality reading to instill a knowledge of God's providential care. Her material encourages hands-on learning, referencing the Montessori method and the value of a child's natural curiosity. We particularly enjoyed the Family Activity Plan and found it to be a wonderful way for all family members to use time more efficiently while building lifetime bonds. The book includes lists of infant language and communication standards along with topics for a baby book and tips on teaching language to infants and toddlers. With two children in our home under three years of age, we found these tips to be good refreshers that helped us stay on task with our younger children. Very careful advice regarding "sharing time" stresses that traditional "Show & Tell" can cause covetousness; other options are presented to replace these traditional activities. The higher-level phases include more creative games and activities and were easily adapted to various age groups and developmental levels. Our favorite new game is the "Flying High with Words" vocabulary game. It truly motivated our 8-year-old as he added new words and flew higher and higher in the game, which for us was a simple space on a living room wall where we posted new words he mastered. Every family will find new ideas and games in 'Miss' Maggie's Fun Guide to Reading, and parents will find that the ideas are very easy to implement. 

We found some of the choices offered for teaching rhyme to be less than adequate, but many of the games and ideas are very creative and made up for any failure in the area of rhyming. Although much of the information may seem repetitive or "basic" to seasoned teachers or experienced child care providers, there are still golden nuggets within the program waiting to be found.

Be aware that the website that is referenced several times throughout the book (missmaggieskits.com) is not valid and did not work at the time of this review. We were unable to verify a new working website, which is unfortunate. Also, some activities request the use of TREND flashcards and may not be easily implemented without those particular cards.

'Miss' Maggie's Fun Guide to Reading may be just the book to offer a level of confidence to parents hoping to teach their children to read. The games and ideas are creative and fun, and the program utilizes phonics rules and phonemic awareness with a style that is easy to implement at various ages. Much of the instruction (particularly the writing tips) will prove helpful beyond the early years of learning to read and into many years of homeschooling. We found this book to be a great addition to our library of reading materials, and we will use it while teaching our younger children to read in years to come.