About Us

We all want our children to read. With great pride we watch our children learn the alphabet and sing the ABC song. We buy picture books and read to them every night. When she can recognize a particular word or he can write his name, we are thrilled. But this is still far from reading the way we understand it. We try to teach reading, but often do not know where to start. So easy for us, reading seems so difficult and confusing to teach.

We found ourselves in this situation when our daughter was four years old. She learned the alphabet, and we were waiting for her to start reading some simple words. We sent for several commercial reading programs, the same ones you often hear advertised on the radio. What we got back was a slew of cassette tapes and flash cards. Our daughter would not sit and listen to the tapes, and the flash cards were all over the house. We also bought software programs for learning to read and found them too shallow and haphazard. Disappointed, we began to make our own simple exercises and stories for her to read. We read books on reading instruction for children, researched academic material, talked to parents and teachers, and began to develop a simple daily reading program. Michael's understanding of child psychology and development, and my desire for a simple, easy-to-follow method, led us to creating The Reading Lesson.

We have created the Reading Lesson for parents who want to teach their children to read and for instructors teaching basic reading skills to children. The program is suitable for both home schooling and classroom use. It is structured, clear and simple but it does require direct involvement of the parent or a teacher, which we believe is a key element in learning to read.

The Reading Lesson is a multimedia program incorporating video and CD-ROMs. It is designed for any child who shows interest in books and reading. Some unique features of this course also make it useful for older children with reading difficulties. The program has also been used with children with ADHD, LD, autism and Down syndrome.


Who we are

We are husband wife team of Charan Langton and Michael Levin. Our company is located in San Ramon, California. San Ramon is a suburban town near San Francisco Bay area.

Michael

I am a physician specializing in behavioral, attentional and learning problems in young children. I had always wanted to recommend a book to parents of my patients but never found a suitable resource. When our daughter was four and my wife became interested in teaching her to read, and my interest in developing an easy to use, step-by-step course took a new turn.

This coming together of my professional interest and at the same time wanting to teach our daughter to read led us to creating this developmentally appropriate reading course for teaching children to read.

I have incorporated all my knowledge about children's learning and development in this program. The pages are clean, with little distraction. The material per page is limited. Child gets a feeling of accomplishment from the very first lesson by reading little stories. The techniques used combine phonics, high frequency word recognition and guided reading. We were fortunate to have some very prominent people in the field of education among our friends and who helped us liberally.

We tested the program with my patients, many of whom had severe attentional and developmental problems and I am proud to say that this program is the best for this particular group of children.
After we did the book, Charan began to work on software to go with it. The software is complementary to the book and helps to engage the child as well as provide an additional mode of learning. Our software is quite different from others in that it very comprehensive. It is entertaining but it is not edutainment. It is loaded with content and so should not be compared with Reader Rabbit type of programs which in my opinion are inadequate in teaching children to read.

I went to medical school at NYU, did a Pediatrics residency at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles and Cedar Sinai Hospital. I then did training in Child Psychiatry at UCLA. Currently I am in private practice in San Ramon, California where I am the Medical Director of East Bay Psychopharmacology Group and see young children for various developmental and learning problems. Previously, I was the Medical Director of the Child Development Center at UC-Irvine and have been an Asst. clinical professor in the UCLA Neuro-Psychiatric Institute and at Stanford University.

My website: http://www.ebpharm.com

Charan

My goal was simple. I just wanted a simple step-by-step program so I could teach my daughter and son to read.

After we tried the Hooked on Phonics package, I purchased a book by Siegfried Engelmann, called "Teach your child to read in 100 easy Lessons." I didn't know it then but this is a very popular book for parents. I liked it a lot. But, I began having problems with it right away. The stories were a bit too long for my four year old. The major flaw of the book is that it completely ignores the fact that English is not 100% phonic. There are many common words that just can not be read using phonic rules. Words like, would, do, no etc. So I began to make a list of such sight words along with the lessons. I also found the scripted format of the book confining and felt that it was not necessary to have the funny looking fonts. A distorted typography as is done in this book is just not necessary. Then one day after feeling frustrated, I said to myself, "I will do my own reading program!" And we did! Of course, it took us nearly five years to do so. Our two children, Nina and Victor who were the initial guinea pigs and hundreds of children in Michael's practice provided a ready validation of our approach. I have a day job working as an engineer. You can see my website dealing with communications engineering at www.complextoreal.com.

Nina and Victor
I did all the programming of the CDs at first but now my son Victor has taken over the programming. Nina, our daughter manages much of the business and is involved in product development. She just graduated from UC Berkeley. Victor is at UC Santa Barbra, majoring in Engineering.It is them at the top of the page posing with the first edition of The Reading Lesson many years ago. They both learned to read with this program and have always been avid readers beacuse if it.If you have a young child. 4 to 5 years old, and even if you are using some other program, try The Reading Lesson. You will be convinced that it is an all around ideal program for your child. Every product on our site is a labor of love for its creators.

Fonts4Teachers is developed by Ramon Abajo, a teacher and a wonderful person from Los Angeles. This font package is superb and I recommend it because I used it myself for developing the Writing Lesson.

Thank you very much for looking at our program.