Biggest Bang for your Buck?

As a teacher, financial considerations when buying materials, especially with my own money, are paramount. The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists, at around $25.00, doesn't give you enough, in my opinion, to justify spending your own hard-earned cash on it.

Many of the things in the book you will find in other resources - textbooks, teaching journals, and on the Internet. They are commonly taught curriculum that will be familiar to reading teachers everywhere. The chapters on Word Groups (synonyms, antonyms, similes, and metaphors), Writing (Parts of Speech, proofreading checklists), Books (lists of books and book reports) will seem especially redundant to most reading teachers. I didn't find these things helpful.

The inclusion of several lists left me puzzled. Murphy's Law and Others, Portmanteau Words (kudos to you if you even know what that means), phonograms, Morse code, and the diacritical marking system are a few lists that I would also do without. What real teacher has time to teach portmanteau words?

To get the most bang for your buck, skip this book. There are so many other great books out there that have great lesson plans and resources for teaching reading that this one will probably sit on your shelf most of the time, like mine has. Spend your valuable money on something else!