If you'd rather place an order by talking to one of our cheerful order desk clerks, please call 1-888-232-4444 (USA and Canada only) or 250-383-6864. From Europe, ring our UK order desk clerk at local rate number 0845 230 9601 (UK only) or 44 (0)1865 722 113.

Teach Your Child to Read in Just Ten Minutes a Day

by Sidney Ledson

236 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-1931; ISBN 1-4120-1554-5; US$22.00, C$24.95, EUR18.00, £12.50

A simplified phonic reading program created at the Sidney Ledson Institute for Intellectual Advancement where, with 100% success, preschoolers as young as two are soon reading skillfully.

Read more!

about the book      about the author      sample excerpts or Table of Contents      catalogue info

About the Book Reveals the phonic program by which preschoolers as young as two begin reading at the Sidney Ledson Institute for Intellectual Advancement (see www.sidneyledsoninstitute.com). This light-hearted, yet scientifically advanced, method permits parents, schoolteachers and even babysitters to quickly teach children of all ages to read.

---

About the Author Born, London, England, 1925. Raised in Toronto's east-end from 1927. Served in the RCAF during WWII as an electronic technician, then attended the Ontario College of Art. Art Career: A complete description is to be found in A Dictionary of Canadian Artists (1971), by Colin MacDonald. Paintings hung in the Royal Canadian Academy, the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolors, the Canadian National Exhibition, The Royal Society of Portrait Painters (London, England), and the Annual Paris Salon (France). Lectured for the Art Gallery of Ontario. Executed many portraits of prominent Canadians and film stars (in both Hollywood and England) as well as commercial art (advertising, magazine and newspaper illustration). Music career: Played alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones, clarinet and flute in various dance bands and small combos (1945-1955), dance-work and jazz, in Canada, U.S., and Europe. Acting: Little Theatre work in Ottawa and private productions working with the then-unknown Rich Little and Dan Aykroyd. Stage hypnotist at military bases in Europe. Incidental vocations: munitions assembly tech, photographer, sales rep (life insurance, real estate, Encycolpaedia Britannica, Fuller Brush, automobiles, advertising and printing), short-order cook, taxi driver. Literary career: Wrote five stage plays, a comedy TV series (Back-page Challenge, aired on Ottawa cable-vision: produced, directed and starred), feature articles for the Ottawa Citizen, magazine articles, press releases and promos (as Information Officer for two federal government departments), radio reports (as a CBC freelance broadcaster). Books published before formally entering the field of education: The FUNdamental French Language Program, and Grammar for People Who Hate Grammar (this latter published in both England and Canada). Educator: Created a phonic reading program employing games to teach my own children, then ages two and three. The quick success of this venture prompted a study of reading technology to learn why similar quick success was difficult in schools. I subsequently wrote Teach Your Child o Read in 60 Days. The book remained in print 23 years and sold an unprecedented 35,000 in Canada plus U.S. sales. A boxed version of the reading program was then produced, requiring me to make several promotional tours across Canada and the U.S. I then learned of the proven relationship between early literacy and heightened intelligence. So, on completing a study of past intellectual titans, and of manufactured geniuses, and of conclusions reached in the fields of psychometrics and epistemology (which deal with the measurement of intelligence, the conditions that advance or retard it, and establish its limits), I wrote Raising Brighter Children. Finally, on deciding to provide for others people's children in intellectual advantage I had inadvertently given my own, I established a center in 1980 offering a special program designed to stimulate intellectual growth. Results confirm that in three years (or fewer) of attendance, children's intelligence rises to genius-level (IQ 140-145). Education was never my chosen field. I began as an amateur. The subject fascinated me and propelled me to begin a study of the mechanics of learning, and to do so without thought for an eventual income or educational stature. I was enthralled by the notion that learning could be speeded or slowed (a spin-off from B.F. Skinner's pioneer work with teaching machines in the late 1950s). This helped me to understand my own aversion to public schooling and my decision to leave school at age 16.

---

Sample Excerpts or Table of Contents

Introduction

In an age when most things are sensationally new, or high-tech, and sometimes both, one might question the presentation of a reading method that is remarkably low-tech and yawningly old -- a method dating back to the era of butter-churns and foot-treadle sewing machines. No matter. The method has a singular saving grace. It works one-hundred percent of the time. I speak of the phonic reading method.

Phonic systems of the past were designed for teaching school-age children. However, by reducing this time-tested method to a simpler form, I have created a reading system that allows you, with no formal training and little preparation, to teach almost anyone to read - including children previously thought too young to begin reading. Bearing in mind that the phonic method was highly successful long before I began tinkering with it thirty years ago, my revisions might be seen as no more than the fitting of new strings on a Stradivarius. My fascination with ways to accelerate learning began in 1961, long before I entered the field of education. Eventually, in 1972, I decided to teach my own two- and three-year-old children what schoolteachers had taught me: that letters stand for sounds. Our lessons took the form of games. So, from my children's standpoint, learning to read was incidental to their engaging in various playful activities. Because I had never taught before, the children's instruction was an explorative venture, one that - to my surprise - led to their passing, in just two months, a reading test for grade 1 children. This test, devised by a noted researcher, is shown on page 221.

The success of our reading venture prompted me to write the book Teach Your Child to Read in 60 Days. But the title was wrong. It should have been Teach Your Child to Read in 46 Days. Why? During our home program I began to doubt the correctness of my unprofessional teaching methods, and changed to one advised by a well-known advocate of early reading. His was a flashcard, "look-say", or "whole word" method (a method now entrenched in schools as part of the widely used "whole language" program). But, after two weeks of trying to memorize words (as the whole word method requires), my children were often guessing. I wanted reading, not guessing, so we changed back to my improvised phonic program. The two weeks we wasted in pursuing the faulty word-memorization method were wrongly counted among the sixty days in the title of the book.

After the book was published in 1975, thousands of parents successfully taught their children to read as I had taught mine. Many wrote to me. Their letters confirmed that the title was incorrect: "Thanks to your method, my child was reading in fifty days." Others said forty days, some, thirty days or twenty days, and one man, Michael J. Hardester of St. Louis, taught his youngster to read in eleven days (possibly a world record).

Was force used? You bet. Mr. Hardester's daughter - then in kindergarten - was so delighted with the reading game, she compelled her father to play it more often and longer than he intended. The program presented here is much improved over the one Michael Hardester and other parents used years ago, which makes me believe that soon, when you are reading bedtime stories to your child, he or she will give you an occasional rest and read the story to you. One book in particular that your child will soon read is presented in part 4: "A Busy Day for Helpful Andrew." You might like to look at it now to see the level of reading your pupil or pupils will soon achieve. A simplified method is monumentally important for quick and easy teaching, but entertainment is important too. So, engaging methods of presentation have been liberally shuffled into our instructional deck to guarantee you a winning hand at teaching, and your child a winning hand at learning.

Get ready for an adventure in reading instruction. If you haven't taught a child to read before, good. You will have no misconceptions, no favored beliefs, no practised errors to unlearn. The simple, motivationally enriched procedures described in this book have already given thousands of children the pleasures of early reading ability, plus the other rare advantages that invariably accompany early reading ‹ advantages you can now easily give to your child.

---

Catalogue Information

---