This book is intended for all educators who work with reading and writing skills. The book combines Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences and recent brain research on reading and writing with historical, anthropological, biographical, and psychological perspectives on literacy. It pulls the research together to show how teachers can engage students by infusing the study of words with imagery, logic, oral language, physical activity, emotion, music, social involvement, and nature experiences. It also provides hundreds of ideas, strategies, and resources for teaching everything from grammar and spelling to word decoding and reading comprehension. The book's "nuts-and-bolts," strategy-focused approach bridges the best reading and writing methods for application in preK-12 regular and special education classrooms, literacy programs, speech and language pathology groups, one-to-one tutoring sessions, and all other settings where words are the focus of learning. Following an Introduction, chapters in the book are: (1) Literacy, Multiple Intelligences, and the Brain; (2) Coming to Grips with the Musculature of Words; (3) Seeing the Visual Basis of Literacy; (4) Grooving with the Rhythms of Language; (5) Calculating the Logic of Words; (6) Feeling the Emotional Power of Text; (7) Relating to the Social Context of Literacy; (8) Speaking Out about the Oral Basis of Reading and Writing; and (9) Opening the Book of Nature; and Conclusion. (Contains 195 references.) (NKA)