Any Child Can Write - Softcover

Harvey S. Weiner is Vice-President, Marymount Manhattan College, and author of Any Child Can Read Better, 2nd ed. (OUP 1996).

Notable for a positive, upbeat tone and readable, informal style, these books, by the author of several other titles on language skills, will motivate, even inspire, parents to supplement and enrich their children's learning experiences. Unlike most recent home-learning books, Any Child Can Read does not cover reading drills, phonetics, sight vocabulary, or sounding out. Rather than urging parents to teach reading, Wiener addresses the ways in which they can help children perform the intellectual tasks involved in critical reading: understanding concepts and meanings, developing skills of inference, determining differences, generalizing, extracting information, and drawing conclusions. He includes a fully annotated list of recommended books for grades one through six with suggestions for talking intelligently with children about the books. This will be a valuable tool for parents, and teachers will find many suggestions they can use in the classroom. Any Child Can Write , a revised edition of a 1978 best seller ( LJ 6/15/78) now out of print, outlines a home program that encourages creative writing. Word games, sentence crafts, autobiography, poetry, narration, painting word pictures, letter writing, and preparing school reports are covered. Appendixes list 100 topics for writing, dictionaries and wordbooks for children, and language skill books for parents. Libraries with the first edition may not find it necessary to acquire this one, although it does contain some updated material. Concerned parents and institutions without the first should have it.
- Shirley L. Hopkinson, California State Univ., San Jose
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.