The Survival Guide for Kids with LD

A chance encounter with an unfortunate bird provides the springboard for Harry Sylvester’s marvelous reflections on confronting and conquering his learning disabilities. Legacy of the Blue Heron: Living with Learning Disabilities is a moving personal account of coping with learning disabilities by an individual with severe dyslexia who became an engineer, businessman, boat-builder, and president of the Learning Disabilities Association of America. This entertaining storyteller’s experiences lead to wise, common-sense advice for solving many problems faced by students, parents, and educators.

Life is good for Jenna Bianchi. She’s just started her second year of teaching English at Morrison High School, a job she loves. She has a pet parrot with attitude. And there’s a handsome math teacher who wants to be more than just friends. But everything changes when a defiant, disruptive tenth grader walks into her classroom.

With a smart mouth and a swagger to match, Michael Tayler is a problem for Jenna from the very first day. His school record screams troublemaker, and Jenna wonders if the new year is already doomed. But when she reads Michael’s first poetry assignment, she recognizes it for what it truly is: a cry for help.

Michael’s presence sets into motion a chain of events that turns Jenna’s perfect life upside-down and threatens to destroy her career. Faced with a challenge unlike anything she’s ever known, Jenna commits to doing what no one has done for Michael Tayler before.

There are a ton of books that offer child-rearing advice, and only a few less that describe research on childhood emotional and learning problems; this is one of the few books that combines the two. Edward Hallowell brings readers into his consultation rooms to meet his clients — and the descriptions and dialogue are effective in bringing the situations to life. When You Worry About the Child You Love will help you understand why your child is unhappy or underachieving, will help you help your child to manage her emotions, and perhaps most important, will help parents do what they can and stop blaming themselves.

Here is a model of reading ideal for striving readers, focused on their personal interests, topic-specific reading, deep background knowledge, contextual reading strategies, and mentoring support. More important, the model moves away from a deficit approach to conceptualize striving readers in a new way. Chapters share success stories of readers who overcome their struggles and highlight instructional strategies and materials you can use to develop activities and lessons for children and adults. Use this research-based model in the classroom or at home to help your striving readers achieve high levels of literacy.

Filled with strategies, and resources, this book uses the author’s groundbreaking research about successful adults with learning disabilities, to promote self-advocacy. This work is brimming with useful and practical information. It is easily understood and embraced by students with learning disabilities, their parents, guidance counselors, and stakeholders in the fields of both higher education and special education.

Some of us learn things in a different way from those around us — do you too? One frog might need a bit of help with counting; another might not know how to behave around other frogs. Other young frogs in this book are easily distracted and get themselves into trouble. But help is at hand: if we think differently about things that we find difficult, we can find our own ways to get better at doing them.