How to Increase Your Child's Verbal Intelligence: The Groundbreaking Language Wise Method

by Carmen McGuinness, Geoffrey McGuinness

Are there specific ways for parents and teachers to help children better understand what they read and hear? Is it possible to raise a child’s verbal intelligence?

The authors of this book answer with a resounding yes. Carmen and Geoffrey McGuinness, creators of the acclaimed and widely used Phono-Graphix method of reading instruction, explain why it is important to teach children comprehension skills and how to do it. Parents and teachers seeking sound, research-supported advice on ways to improve their children’s reading comprehension will find this book an essential resource. Each of the dozens of exercises and activities in the book is aimed at improving the comprehension―and the writing skills―of children from 6 to 18 years of age.

We can teach our children the skills they need to understand and use the information they read, the authors assure us. McGuinness and McGuinness show how comprehension can be broken down into small components of understanding. They provide a variety of fun-to-do lessons to help readers progress beyond decoding to real comprehension. The lessons
• how to use synonyms
• how to read passive voice
• how to anticipate what will happen in a story
• how to define a word by its context in a story
• how to remember key elements in a written passage
• and many more

This book is an essential primer for parents wishing to understand how children learn, process, and use language.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Dr. Carmen McGuinness is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, and health psychologist, specializing in children with disabilities, attachment, and family trauma. In addition to working with children and parents, Dr. McGuinness has taught psychology graduate students and is the author of three popular academic books. Recently she released her first fiction novel, Unintended Consequences a Psychological Romance (June 1, 2017).

Reviews

[Douglas Lord · Rating 3 out of 5]

The McGuinnesses (Reading Reflex: The Foolproof Phono-Graphix Method for Teaching Your Child to Read) observe that "language is that thing that most strongly connects us to our fellow man" and bemoan the dumbing down of American elementary education. While referencing an impressive number of studies and research projects, their discussion of the components of verbal intelligence is uneven. Each of the six chapters fails to achieve all of their stated objectives. Undefined terms like M-Factor and document literacy level clog the text, and many concepts that should have been explained by exposition are poorly illustrated by example. The book includes 38 improvement exercises, which seem like fun. While the book may enable six- to eight-plus-year-olds to become more "language wise" and to understand, judge, store, retrieve, and discuss what they think, hear, and read, it is debatable just how much of an organized method this constitutes. While parents would do fine with something like Harvey S. Wiener's Talk With Your Child, now, regrettably, out of print, this is more appropriate for curriculum and teaching collections.

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[Mati · Rating 5 out of 5]

"So long as the world holds new challenges, old limits must be broken to meet them.""Failure acts as a reward by providing new information and opportunities to try new skills."Great Book