The Worst Speller in Jr. High

All parents want their children to read well and to succeed — and experts agree that improving literacy begins at birth. Reading aloud to your child, sharing simple games and wordplay, and developing letter knowledge start your child off on the right foot for school and life. Now the esteemed Lee Pesky Learning Center has created this easy, accessible reference for parents to help foster better literacy skills in children.

Leo isn’t reading, or writing, or drawing, or even speaking, and his father is concerned. But Leo’s mother isn’t. She knows her son will do all those things, and more, when he’s ready.

Until the 1960s a learning disability was a hidden handicap wearing many guises and treated ineffectively. Today, shows the author, founder of the unique Lab School in Washington, D.C., and herself the parent of a learning-disabled child, there is growing evidence that such difficulties can be either overcome or modified by teaching strategies that address the student’s specific strengths. The stories of adults—some of them celebrities like Cher, who suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia—who coped with learning problems throughout their school days illustrate the depths of the disability said to afflict more than 25 million Americans. Distilling her experiences with learning-disabled students, their parents and teachers, Smith demonstrates that a variety of approaches to learning can yield later career success, thus offering hope to children and adults so burdened.

Dale Borman Fink, the author of the only book on inclusion of youth with special needs in after school child care, now presents the first book to examine the experiences of children with disabilities participating in youth programs alongside their typical peers. Using a case study technique, he probes into the issues and dynamics that influence the increasing participation of kids with disabilities in such activities as Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and park and recreation programs.

Kids write letters to one of the greatest scientists of all time — and he answers them!

This book offers a small sampling of the amusing, touching, and sometimes precocious letters sent to Albert Einstein by children from around the world, and his often witty and very considerate responses. Alice Calaprice has compiled a delightful and charming collection of more than 60 letters, most never published before, from children to perhaps the greatest scientist of all time. Enhancing this correspondence are numerous photographs showing Einstein amid children, wearing an Indian headdress, carrying a puppet of himself, donning furry slippers, among many other wonderful pictures. They reveal the intimate human side of the great public persona, a man who, though he spent his days contemplating the impersonal abstractions of mathematics and physics, was very fond of children and enjoyed being in their company. 

When Marvin’s name is not on the class roster on the first day of school, he feels like he’s one too many – in fact he doesn’t even have a desk. Plus, Marvin can’t seem to catch on to reading as quickly as the other kids. Perhaps a little help from his teacher and his parents will give Marvin the boost he needs.