In her best-selling book, "Teach Them All To Read", Elaine McEwan provides a great discussion of the most current reading research regarding how students learn to read so educators can make informed decisions about instruction. Research about reading has given us insight into the skills on which we need to focus our efforts to improve reading and comprehension. Now we can identify the skills that require reinforcement and intervene with explicit, thoughtful instruction. The activities in "The Reading Puzzle" series will help the teacher accomplish this goal. "The Reading Puzzle" series provides instructional tools teachers can use immediately as part of the reading curriculum. "The Reading Puzzle" series contains 10 books for Kindergarten through Grade 8 centered on the skills identified by the National Reading Panel as critical to reading success.Each of these books in the series helps unlock one piece of the reading puzzle and contains standards-based, ready-to-use activities that can be used to supplement any reading program. The books include: "Phonemic Awareness, Grades K-3"; "Phonics, Grades K-3"; "Vocabulary, Grades K-3"; "Fluency, Grades K-3"; "Comprehension, Grades K-3"; "Word Analysis, Grades 4-8"; "Spelling, Grades 4-8"; "Vocabulary, Grades 4-8"; "Fluency, Grades 4-8"; and, "Comprehension, Grades 4-8". These activity books contain ready-to-use activities that make it easy to put McEwan's highly-successful strategies into practice. The strategies and activities will support struggling readers and enhance existing skill to encourage improvement in all students' reading skills.This book presents the spelling rules and their exceptions in a concise, fun, and interactive way with a variety of activities and games. "Spelling 4-8" provides structured, teacher-directed spelling practice for upper elementary and middle-school students. Each chapter provides a teaching strategy that limits the amount of new information students receive at one time so they can internalize one spelling skill before moving onto another. The book is organized around common spelling rules. Each lesson contains an introduction to present the rule, activities and reproducibles to practice the rule, and an assessment to evaluate learning. The Spelling Rules Chart is a useful reference for students to use all year long! The book also contains a chapter called 'Assessments.' These assessments can be used formally to assess student learning or informally to determine what rules need to be taught.As students gain confidence in spelling proficiency, confidence in their writing ability will also grow. When students master the spelling rules contained in this book, they will be able to put more energy into their creative 'what' to put on paper, and not labor over 'how' to spell the words that appear on the page in front of them. Better spellers will become more effective, happy, and willing writers.