Teach Your Child to Read in Just Ten Minutes a Day

Reveals the phonic program by which preschoolers as young as two begin reading at the Sidney Ledson Institute for Intellectual Advancement (see www.sidneyledsoninstitute.net). This light-hearted, yet scientifically advanced, method permits parents, schoolteachers and even babysitters to quickly teach children of all ages to read.

Art Career: A complete description is to be found in A Dictionary of Canadian Artists (1971), by Colin MacDonald. Paintings hung in the Royal Canadian Academy, the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolors, the Canadian National Exhibition, The Royal Society of Portrait Painters (London, England), and the Annual Paris Salon (France). Lectured for the Art Gallery of Ontario. Executed many portraits of prominent Canadians and film stars (in both Hollywood and England) as well as commercial art (advertising, magazine and newspaper illustration).

Music career: Played alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones, clarinet and flute in various dance bands and small combos (1945-1955), dance-work and jazz, in Canada, U.S., and Europe.

Acting: Little Theatre work in Ottawa and private productions working with the then-unknown Rich Little and Dan Aykroyd. Stage hypnotist at military bases in Europe.

Incidental vocations: munitions assembly tech, photographer, sales rep (life insurance, real estate, Encycolpaedia Britannica, Fuller Brush, automobiles, advertising and printing), short-order cook, taxi driver.

Literary career: Wrote five stage plays, a comedy TV series (Back-page Challenge, aired on Ottawa cable-vision: produced, directed and starred), feature articles for the Ottawa Citizen, magazine articles, press releases and promos (as Information Officer for two federal government departments), radio reports (as a CBC freelance broadcaster). Books published before formally entering the field of education: The FUNdamental French Language Program, and Grammar for People Who Hate Grammar (this latter published in both England and Canada).

Educator: Created a phonic reading program employing games to teach my own children, then ages two and three. The quick success of this venture prompted a study of reading technology to learn why similar quick success was difficult in schools. I subsequently wrote Teach Your Child o Read in 60 Days. The book remained in print 23 years and sold an unprecedented 35,000 in Canada plus U.S. sales. A boxed version of the reading program was then produced, requiring me to make several promotional tours across Canada and the U.S.

I then learned of the proven relationship between early literacy and heightened intelligence. So, on completing a study of past intellectual titans, and of manufactured geniuses, and of conclusions reached in the fields of psychometrics and epistemology (which deal with the measurement of intelligence, the conditions that advance or retard it, and establish its limits), I wrote Raising Brighter Children.

Finally, on deciding to provide for others people's children in intellectual advantage I had inadvertently given my own, I established a center in 1980 offering a special program designed to stimulate intellectual growth. Results confirm that in three years (or fewer) of attendance, children's intelligence rises to genius-level (IQ 140-145).

Education was never my chosen field. I began as an amateur. The subject fascinated me and propelled me to begin a study of the mechanics of learning, and to do so without thought for an eventual income or educational stature. I was enthralled by the notion that learning could be speeded or slowed (a spin-off from B.F. Skinner's pioneer work with teaching machines in the late 1950s). This helped me to understand my own aversion to public schooling and my decision to leave school at age 16.