Help Me Get Ready To Read: The Practical Guide For Reading Aloud To Children During Their First Five Years
Susan Marx is a parent educator, writer and editor of educational materials for students and teachers, and an elementary school teacher. Over the past 17 years, she has facilitated over 600 Families First positive parenting workshops for diverse groups of parents and professionals at homeless shelters, daycare centers, preschools, public and independent schools, worksites, and national early childhood conferences. Workshop topics include creating home-school partnerships, helping children succeed in school, understanding children's temperament, and getting children ready for kindergarten. She has appeared in parenting spots on Boston TV and cable networks, and has been interviewed by major newspapers and parenting magazines. As a writer and editor, Susan prepared materials for reading, social studies, spelling, and language arts textbooks and practice books for DC Heath, Silver Burdett Ginn, Macmillan, and Houghton Mifflin. In addition, she gave sales presentations to state textbook adoption committees. Susan also taught grades K through 5 in New York, California, and Massachusetts. She has three children and eight grandchildren.   Barbara Kasok is a consulting teacher of reading and has done graduate work in reading at Boston University and Lesley College. Barbara taught in elementary school classrooms in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and in federally funded Title I reading programs (K-4) in Massachusetts. When she directed her own daycare program for children ages 1 to 3, reading aloud was an important part of each day. At Silver Burdett Ginn, a division of Simon and Schuster, Barbara was a project manager responsible for working with teachers, freelance writers, and reading specialists from Boston University, University of Colorado, and University of Virginia to develop national reading programs for K-8. Also, she worked as a project manager to develop,  write, and edit manuscript for K-8 reading, language arts, math, and social studies  materials for national publishers, such as Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, and Scholastic.  These materials include reading lessons for teachers, reading practice books for children,  decodable storybooks for beginning readers, and rhyme and poem books. Barbara has three children and two grandchildren.