Brain Words

“Gentry and Ouellette are cannonballing into the reading research pool, they’re making waves, and these waves are moving the field of reading forward.”             —From the foreword by Mark Weakland, Super Spellers

The past two decades have brought giant leaps in our understanding of how the brain works. But these discoveries—and all their exciting implications—have yet to make their way into most classrooms.

With the concise and readable BrainWords, you will learn how children’s brains develop as they become readers and discover ways you can take concrete steps to promote this critical developmental passage.

Introducing their original, research-based framework of “brain words”—dictionaries in the brain where students store and automatically access sounds, spellings, and meanings—the authors offer a wealth of information that will transform your thinking and practice:

• Up-to-date knowledge about reading and neurological circuitry, including evidence that spelling is at the core of the reading brain
• Tools to recognize what works, what doesn’t, and why
• Practical classroom activities for daily teaching and student assessment
• Insights about what brain research tells us about whole language and phonics-first movements
• Deepened understanding of dyslexia through the enhanced lens of brain science

With the insights and strategies of BrainWords, you can meet your students where they are and ensure that more of them read well, think well, and write well.