The Child With Special Needs: Encouraging Intellectual and Emotional Growth

Consumer text provides possible explanations for some of the behaviors children with autism may exhibit, so parents and teachers can create environmental supports for different kinds of behavior problems.

Today’s parents are increasingly concerned about the reading and spelling skills taught in schools and are taking charge of their children’s education. Full of ideas and suggestions — from innovative preschool exercises to techniques that older children can use to increase reading speed and comprehension — Straight Talk About Reading will instantly help any parent lay a solid foundation for their child’s formative educational years.

This anthology is comprised of two major components: thirteen full-length, autobiographical essays written by persons with learning disabilities and five analytical chapters written by education and psychology scholars. Speaking in terms alternately intimate and analytical, the autobiographical essays each tell of a sustained personal encounter with the challenges and mysteries of living with a learning disability. But these autobiographies are not merely personal, concerned solely with their writers’ private lives. Rather, they are also in various ways consciously analytical, offering astute critical readings of culture and society. The scholarly essays are written by such noted educators and psychologists as Lisa Delpit, Robert Kegan, and Janet Lerner. For any educator or parent of students with learning disabilities.

How and when does a child begin to make sense of the world? Why does a lively preschool child so often become a semiliterate and defeated school failure?

Developmental psychologist Margaret Donaldson shows that much of the intellectual framework on which we base our teaching is misleading. We both underestimate the astonishing rational powers of young children and ignore the major stumbling block that children face when starting school.

Given a setting and a language that makes sense to them in human terms, very young children can perform tasks often thought to be beyond them. The preschool child learns everything in a human situation. Only in school is he asked to acquire skills―reading, writing, arithmetic―isolated from a real-life context. This transition is difficult.

The author suggests a range of strategies that parents and schools can adopt to help children. She argues that reading is even more important than we have thought it to be, since learning to read can actually speed children through the crucial transition.

This practical volume is designed to help school practitioners and educators build stronger connections with families and enhance student achievement in grades K-12. Beyond simply getting parents involved in schoolwork, the book describes how positive family-school relationships can socialize and support children and adolescents as learners throughout their academic careers. Identified are key pathways by which professionals and parents can develop common goals for learning and behavior, a shared sense of accountability, better communication, and a willingness to listen to different perspectives. The focus is on assumptions, goals, attitudes, behaviors, and strategies that professionals can draw on both to assess school-home connections that are currently in place and to implement new, more productive practices. Grounded in theory and research, the book features case examples, self-reflective exercises, and discussion questions in every chapter.

Note: This is the bound book only and does not include access to the Enhanced Pearson eText. To order the Enhanced Pearson eText packaged with a bound book, use ISBN 0134471881. A practical approach to identifying, understanding, and helping students with language difficulties achieve success in school and beyond. 

With an emphasis on the connection between language and literacy, Teaching Students with Language and Communication Disabilities explores language development and language disorders within the context of specific disabilities. The book is designed to help teachers and other professionals acquire knowledge about language, language development, language disorders, and evidence-based practices for enhancing language skills that will enable them to become more effective teachers and/or clinicians. Student vignettes, teacher perspectives, activities, and literacy sections foster the application of concepts to real classroom situations.

The Fifth Edition includes reconceptualized chapters that use the Response to Intervention (RtI) model as as the framework for classroom-based language assessment and instructional methods. Expanded discussions of emerging teaching technologies and the latest research literature are included throughout the book. The Enhanced Pearson eText version of the text features embedded videos, check your understanding quizzes, and application exercises. Improve mastery and retention with the Enhanced Pearson eText The Enhanced Pearson eText provides a rich, interactive learning environment designed to improve student mastery of content. The Enhanced Pearson eText is:

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