Writing Better: Effective Strategies for Teaching Students with Learning Difficulties

An engaging must-read for any parent, educator, or counselor of smart kids who face learning difficulties. The authors, who have more than 20 years experience working with and advocating for gifted and learning diabled children, provide useful, practical advice for helping smart kids with learning challenges succeed in school.

This book is filled with the strategies, supports, and interventions that have been found to be the most effective in minimizing the problems and optimizing the success of children and teens with ADHD. In addition, the easy-to-use 8 1/2 x 11 lay-flat format is filled with reproducible checklists, forms, tools, and resources.

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.

Fundamentals for the Consumer is designed to enable students to become intelligent consumers of educational research and to introduce basic research principles to those who may eventually be involved in research in their work. Principles for conducting research and criteria for evaluating its overall credibility are presented in a concise non-technical manner. Understanding researcher intent, procedures, and results is promoted throughout the text. Students are shown how to analyze and evaluate the research, and judge the usefulness of the findings for educational practice.

This is the definitive source for information on learning disabilities. Get new information about federal mandates, teaming, transitioning, and involving parents. You’ll also have a thorough discussion of the social and emotional aspects of LD and a glossary of terms. Get well-organized information about five major disabilities: communication disorders, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, and attention deficit disorder (ADD). For each of the five disabilities, you’ll have: definitions, characteristic charts, screening checklists, intervention tips and strategies, and a comprehensive list of resources.

In opposition to traditional models of special education, where teachers decide when a child is deemed “ready to compete” in “mainstream” classes, Mara Sapon-Shevin articulates a vision of full inclusion as a practical and moral goal. Inclusion, she argues, begins not with the assumption that students have to earn their way into the classroom with their behavior or skills, it begins with the right of every child to be in the mainstream of education, perhaps with modifications, adaptations, and support. Full inclusion requires teachers to think about all aspects of their classrooms — pedagogy, curriculum, and classroom climate.