Special Needs Advocacy Resource Book

In Overcoming Underachieving two nationally recognized experts in children’s school problems show you how to become your child’s advocate, coach, and guide through the educational process. Using numerous case examples, they help you pinpoint your child’s unique learning patterns and the problems that interfere with learning, behavior, and achievement. This information-packed book provides dozens of creative, parent-tested tools to help your child overcome difficulties with reading, math, handwriting, study skills, memorization, attention span, and many other problems that affect school success.

Peer Power explodes existing myths about children’s friendships, power, and popularity, and the gender chasm between elementary school boys and girls. Based on eight years of intensive insider participant observation in their own children’s community, the authors discuss the vital components in the lives of preadolescents: popularity, friendships, cliques, social status, social isolation, loyalty, bullying, boy-girl relationships, and afterschool activities.

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.

This book is an engaging, reader-friendly work which guides parents through the formative years of a child’s life. This well-regarded book is now available in paperback, newly revised to reflect the most recent studies. The new edition features information from the latest research, including traumatic events in the news, television and learning skills, physical activity, and temperament.

With a specific focus on the brain, the book takes the reader through specific phases of child development beginning with Life in the Womb an going through the first six years of life. Each chapter ends with a section “To Think About,” addressing such practical matters as good-night rituals, reading books together and coping with conflict.

Chester Raccoon doesn’t want to go to school - he wants to stay home with his mother. She tells him he’ll make new friends and read new stories. Plus, she’s going to share a special, family secret with him - the Kissing Hand. This secret, she tells him, will make school seem as cozy as home.

This book uses the Building Blocks model. The Building Blocks model is practical, supported by research, and easy to implement. It identifies ten areas important to school success (the building blocks), divided into three levels:

1. the foundational level includes attention and impulse control, emotion and behavior, self-esteem, and learning environment blocks
2. the symbolic processing and memory level contains the visual, auditory, and motor skills blocks
3. the conceptual level comprises using strategies and thinking with language and images