Author Description

The aim of this book is to teach remedial reading skills along with basic science concepts, using high interest stories geared to teens and pre-teens. The ability to decode difficult words is essential to the comprehension of any science text. Reading words in word families and spelling these words from dictation is an effective technique for improving decoding skills. If a student can spell a word, he or she can read the word. As a teacher of remedial reading and science in special and regular education for over thirty years, I have learned that poor decoding skills and a weak vocabulary are significant impediments to reading science texts or other academic contexts. Even when the student succeeds in struggling through the decoding and the vocabulary, he often finds the content unrelated to his life. To address this issue, the stories run like a teenage soap opera, with boy/girl relationships, adolescent humor, and conflict resolution. Story lines continue from one story into the next, often ending in cliffhangers that entice the student into wanting to read more. Mixed into each story is significant science content that is related to the lives of the characters. In addition, care has been taken to teach health consciousness, social skills, and values.The Application of scientific knowledge to everyday situations will become apparent to each student. At the same time, the stories are designed to teach linguistic decoding skills. A list of words for decoding, spelling, and vocabulary building introduces each story. These word lists target fourth through six grade reading levels.[1]The word lists are not meant to be all-inclusive, but to remediate gaps in the secondary student’s decoding ability. Each word list covers a few basic word patterns based on the science words needed for the content. Other words having the same linguistic pattern are added to the list. Lower level decoding skills are taught in Learning to Read for Teens, a Remedial Prog