Meg and Greg: A Handful of Dogs - by Elspeth Rae & Rowena Rae (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A decodable book featuring four phonics stories for striving readers, with special features to help children with dyslexia or other language-based learning difficulties find reading success.

Meg and Greg are back to school and ready for fall fun! Join Meg, Greg and friends as they plan an event for dogs at the fall fair, solve challenging clues in a scavenger hunt, complete their planned science-fair project and look after excitable kindergarteners at the pumpkin patch.

Meg and Greg: A Handful of Dogs is the fifth book in the Meg and Greg series designed for shared reading between a child learning to read and an experienced reader. The four stories inside introduce different types of suffixes and prefixes (consonant suffixes -ful -ly -ment -s, vowel suffixes -en -er -es -est -ing -y, the suffix -ed and prefixes de- dis- ex- in- pre- re- un-) and the spelling rules for adding them to base words. In addition to the familiar comic-style kids' pages, Book 5 features new highly controlled and decodable prose pages to gently increase the amount of text that readers experience and to provide even more opportunities to practice the reading skills previously introduced in Meg and Greg Books 1-4!

Review Quotes

"The 'Meg and Greg' series continue to deliver valuable phonics instruction through engaging stories. The series offers a rare and much-needed resource for children with dyslexia. The adult-child team reading approach is innovative and makes this series a valuable addition to any collection, particularly for libraries supporting diverse reading needs"

"Meg and Greg find themselves faced with a variety of exciting and, at times, funny problems. The four story format with five chapters in each story provides a flow to the reading and adds interest and suspense, [and] co-authors Elspeth Rae and Rowena Rae incorporate a number of reading features in this learning experience geared to striving readers with language-based learning challenges...Once the format is explained to the child and proficient reading partner, A Handful of Dogs will provide a fun, engaging reading adventure for both. Highly recommended."

About the Author

Elspeth Rae has a BEd from Simon Fraser University and is a teacher certified in using the Orton-Gillingham approach to teach children of all abilities to read and spell. She especially enjoys working with children with dyslexia and other language-learning difficulties. Elspeth was diagnosed with dyslexia at age eight and received Orton-Gillingham instruction during her school years. She works as a literacy specialist in the public school system and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her husband and three children.

Rowena Rae worked as a biologist in Canada and New Zealand before taking an MA in writing at Johns Hopkins University and then becoming a freelance writer and editor and a children's author. She is the author of Why We Need Vaccines, the award-winning Salmon in the Orca Wild series, Chemical World and Upstream, Downstream in the Orca Footprints series. Rowena writes both fiction and nonfiction from her home in Victoria, British Columbia, which she shares with her two book-loving children.

Elisa Gutiérrez is an award-winning designer, author and illustrator. Her book Picturescape was shortlisted for the Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize, was honored by the Alcuin Society and was the subject of a scholarly paper by the renowned Dr. Lawrence Sipe. Elisa has designed over 100 books and specializes in book design for children. Born and raised in Mexico City, Elisa lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her family.