There are two ways to reboot that I know of. You seem to be saying to do a third: holding the power button to get the slider to appear, then sliding the slider while holding the home button? That will just turn the iPad off.

Turning the iPad off is one way - hold the power button until the slider appears, then slide the slider. No need to fiddle with the home button.

A hard reboot is also handy, especially if the device isn't responding: hold down the power and home buttons until the device reboots and you see the Apple logo. This isn't a graceful shutdown, however, so you may experience some data loss or corruption if something goes wrong. But, I've done this many times and never had a problem.