Succeeding with LD: 20 True Stories About Real People with LD

This completely updated book contains new chapters on Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and on the public laws that guarantee an equal education for learning disabled children. There is also an entirely new section on learning disabled adults and the laws that protect them. Sally Smith, the parent of a learning disabled child herself, guides parents along every step of the way, from determining if their child is learning disabled to challenging the school system to provide special services. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of experience at her own nationally acclaimed school, she also offers valuable strategies to teachers who are anxious or discouraged as they struggle with learning disabled students. Although there are no easy answers, Sally Smith’s experience, wealth of information, and sense of humor provide essential support.

Are you brave enough to be your true self? Ikarus Jackson is, but it isn’t always easy. The people in his neighborhood point at his wings. The kids at school laugh. The teachers call him a distraction. One girl identifies with Ikarus, but she is too shy to speak up for herself, let alone for him. Maybe I should have said something to those mean kids, she thinks, when their taunts send him drifting into the sky. Inspired by Ikarus’s own courage, she sets out in search of him and so begins her own journey of self discovery — leaving both of them transformed. “I wanted to create a book that tells kids never to abandon the things that make them different, to be proud of what makes them unique. Every child has his own beauty, her own talents. Ikarus Jackson can fly through the air; I want kids to find their own set of wings and soar with him.” — Christopher Myers

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.

The book illustrates through its images and words the feelings and thoughts of an ADHD child. Using the delicate approach of the fairy tale genre, this book provides children with ADHD an opportunity to identify with their thoughts, feelings and actions through the young character in the book.

This book takes the reader step-by-step through an understanding of the research on reading and ways in which parents and educators can make a difference in the learning ability of every student in our nation’s schools.

There was something wrong with my brain. What had previously been a shadowy suspicion that hovered on the edge of consciousness became certain knowledge the year I was nine and entered fourth grade. I seemed to be like other children, but I was not like them; I could not learn to read or spell.

In this first account of what it is like to grow up dyslexic, Eileen Simpson vividly recreates the frightening world of a child living in the limbo of illiteracy. Simpson’s lack of reading skills so exasperated her teachers and relatives that they began to think she was mentally retarded. She could get lost walking to the grocery store; at times she felt as if she had no control over her speech. It was not until she was twenty-two that her future husband, the poet John Berryman, finally named her mysterious ailment.

Simpson intersperses her narrative with nontechnical explanations of dyslexia and what is being done to treat it. But despite growing public awareness and advances in research, dyslexia remains a frustrating and frightening disorder.