"A is for Apple... Blah, blah, blah." Other than being the first letter in the word apple, what does the letter A have to do with an apple?! WHAT IF... LETTERS WERE ALIVE? What would they be ? What do the letters look like any way ? Inspired by a child's struggle with dyslexia, IMAGINE AN ALPHABET confronts letter identification problems "head on." IMAGINE AN ALPHABET approaches letters from a different angle, providing tangible visual prompts, playfully helping the learner distinguish each letter from all the others. As a tool of alphabet introduction, IMAGINE AN ALPHABET is well suited for any beginning reader, not only those with specific difficulties. When the student comes away from this book wanting to make and draw pictures of letters, they are becoming engaged and invested in their own quest for knowledge! EDUCATING while ENTERTAINING, a playful "picta-poeia" if you will, IMAGINE AN ALPHABET asks the reader to picture the whole world full of FUNtastic letters !
About the Author: D J Smith is a native of California's San Francisco Bay Area, who as a child had great difficulty learning to read, "My parents hoped that I would prove to be at least average." D J has lived in the "City Of Angels" for a few decades where he has enjoyed designing, and painting scenery and sculpting props for stage, theme parks, film and television, until 2010 when MS disabled him. He is now occupied fulltime in front of his MAC, editing video and finally finishing his illustrated stories. "Life can sure have a strange way of getting you to do something that you really should have been doing all along." IMAGINE AN ALPHABET was born out of this father's nightly, after school struggle with his daughter and her homework. "An obviously intelligent child, she could not make heads or tails out of the printed word. She would declare, "But Daddy, the letters keep jumping all around!?" Eventually she was diagnosed and labeled as being dyslexic and also, not so oddly enough "intellectually gifted". People with dyslexia can be exceptional, they must by nature think outside of the box, often improving all of our lives." "When looking at the printed page most of us have no problem separating the letters and words on the page from one another. For those among us with dyslexia and other learning difficulties LETTER IDENTIFACATION can be a huge problem. I started asking my daughter, and myself what do these 26 letters actually look like? Let's not worry about how they fit into words just yet, but let's just imagine that if these letters were things, real objects, what would they be? We were going to find a new and better way to figure out those pesky letters!" D J is passionate about igniting in children the desire for education and knowledge. Believing learning can and should be enjoyable, he is working on a series of books sure to provide plenty more fun with letters, words, and language.