for a student

If you care anything at all about literacy, this book is a must-read. Educators, parents (home educating or not), adults who struggle with reading or spelling ... just get this from your library or bookstore and dig in.

The first part fleshes out what went wrong in our country to create the current literacy crisis. The crisis is even worse than I thought, and what's unacceptable is there is a practical solution that isn't widely being implemented: there is an actual logic to English, and we can learn rules to help us decode and encode words with accuracy.

The book then takes us through 31 English rules that work for 98% percent of words. The exceptions are rare, and can be dealt with. Oh, and how many vowel sounds are in English? Definitely not 5, nor 10. We have 15 vowel sounds, made by 28 written phonograms to represent those sounds.

This is a useful book to read to get a handle on what reading and spelling instruction can be. For a quick reference book, "ABC's and All Their Tricks" might do the ticket (though it has a dry format. Uncovering the Logic of English is readable and interesting).

This is also not a curriculum as-is. For that, go for Logic of English Foundations or Essentials, also by Denise Eide. Or really, any Orton-Gillingham approach is fine if you prefer another take on it.

Uncovering helps get a quick handle on what in the world we're trying to do here: give people the tools they need to read and spell.

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go." (Seuss, obvs.) ( )

"But what if the problem is not the language itself, but the rules we were taught? What if we could see the complexity of English as a powerful tool rather than a hindrance?" ~ Denise Eide

Every parent and every teacher should study this book - in fact, so should every speaker of English - particularly those of us who were taught with the inefficient and harmful methods used in the last 50+ years. ( )