Eagle Eyes: A Child’s Guide to Paying Attention

“…the book is a winner! This charming tale delivers a message of respect, resilience and hope to its young audience…The adventures of the appealing characters are extraordinarily effective in demystifying learning disabilities for special needs kids and their classmates. It belongs in every elementary school library, and save room on the shelves for the sequels!” — Rick Lavoie, Former Executive Director of Riverview School in East Sandwich, MA, and producer of How Difficult Can This Be?: The F.A.T. City Workshop

This is the story of Chic L. Dee, a boy bird with learning disabilites, who flip-flops when he tries to fly. While he struggles to accept his limitations, he begins to discover his talents, trust his intuition and find his own way. Perhaps most importantly, he learns about making room for differences. Any kid who has ever felt embarrassed socially, who has ever resorted to bravado in the face of shame, will understand Chic — and love this story.

Public libraries will want to purchase this book for their education and parenting collections. It is a brief, upbeat, always realistic look at what learning disabilities are and what problems LD children and parents face at home and at school.
— Library Journal

Twenty talented, successful people with LD tell their own stories in this inspiring book. Some are famous (one received a MacArthur Foundation Award), most are not, but all are positive role models for people with or without LD. B&W photos.

Do people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder have a “Deficit” and a “Disorder”? Or are they just different in some ways from people around them? In Distant Drums and Different Drummers, the author presents a more positive perspective on ADHD — one that stresses the value of individual differences. The child with ADHD, with his penchant for novelty and exploration, his boundless energy, and his tendency to take risks, is seen as the descendant of a long line of adventures and explorers stretching far back beyond the beginnings of recorded history.

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

This book features 169 reproducible activities which provide opportunities for active learning and student practice in the study skills and strategies most important for students with special needs. Teaching students with special needs to use study skills and strategies effectively is an important step in transforming these students into independent learners. In addition to the reproducible activities themselves, each chapter in this book contains suggestions for using the activities, mastery assessment, and an answer key.