The Source for Nonverbal Learning Disorders

First of all, know this — you’re smart and can learn! You just learn differently. This guide will help answer some of your important questions about having LD, such as “Why is it hard for kids with LD to learn?” and “What happens when you grow up?” It will also provide suggestions on how to deal with issues in school and take some of the mystery out of what having LD means (and doesn’t mean). Includes resources for parents and teachers.

Voices from Fatherhood is unique in focusing on fathers’ concerns in parenting their ADHD sons. It offers fathers support and encouragement and specific management techniques. In summary, this is a book that everyone — fathers, mothers, educators, and mental health professionals — will find useful in helping to understand the dynamics of modern day father-son relationships.

If you are a parent of a child with special needs, perhaps you have also felt lost and wished you knew someone in a similar situation you could turn to for support. If so, you’re not alone. Across the country, parents are providing emotional and informational support to other parents through a national network of Parent to Parent programs. In this comprehensive book, the authors share with you the ins and outs of developing and maintaining a strong, local Parent to Parent program that individually matches “veteran” supporting parents with those who are new to the challenges of caring for a child with a disability. Drawing on research about Parent to Parent groups and best practices in program development and training, you’ll get the basics of setting up your own program, including guidelines for finding, preparing, and matching supporting parents with newly referred parents, ideas for organizing and incorporating your program, and evaluating its effectiveness, tips on accessing funding and promoting your program througho0ut the community, and useful forms and extensive lists of contacts and resources to get you started.

Some strategies are effective and efficient, and others are not. Those that are both effective and efficient share characteristics that fall into three categories: content features, design features, and usefulness features. The content of the strategy refers to its steps and what they are designed to facilitate during the learning process. The design features refer to how the steps are packaged to facilitate learning and subsequent use of the strategy. The usefulness feature refers to the potential transferability of the strategy to everyday needs in a variety of settings. Ellis and Lenz (1987) identified a number of critical features across these dimensions.

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 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.