Beginning Reasoning & Reading is a comprehensive workbook with four units: Word Meaning, Sentence Meaning, Paragraph Meaning and Reasoning Skills. It’s glossy cover with a green and gold star design is attractive to adults, and the 140 pages of exercises are well laid out with good fonts and lots of white space.

The Word Meaning unit covers topics like parts and wholes, classifying, same or different, opposites, word relationships, categories, analogies, definitions and following directions. The activities, while not necessary for every student, are clearly explained, stress thinking, and are fun to do.

The unit on Sentence Meaning focuses on how to make a sentence and get the point of the sentence. Among other things, activities include working with jumbled sentences, time order, cause and effect, key words, comparison and following directions.

Unit three, Paragraph Meaning, is the one most widely used by field-testers. As well as the usual “topic sentence, body and concluding sentence” aspects of paragraph writing, it gives exercises on unity, main idea, signal words, time order, steps in a process, cause and effect, comparisons and examples. There is opportunity to practice these aspects of paragraph writing and opportunity to analyze some sample paragraphs as well. This unit is an improvement over the previous publication, Beginning Paragraph Meaning, also by Joanne Carlisle. Some students found the directions confusing in the earlier workbook, but this has been addressed by changing the layout slightly and increasing the amount of white space between directions and exercises. Also, directions are now in bold print and labeled as directions – a definite plus!

The final unit, Reasoning Skills, offers practice in deciding between fact and opinion, judging opinions, making decisions and deciding whether or not there is enough information. It also gives opportunity to decide whether information is relevant, making and judging inferences, making comparisons, using syllogisms and drawing conclusions. I think all literacy instructors would agree that these are worthwhile topics!

I recommend this workbook – or specifically chosen portions of it – for students at the functional level either in the classroom or in the tutored setting.