The Night I Flunked My Field Trip (Hank Zipzer)

Life is good for Jenna Bianchi. She’s just started her second year of teaching English at Morrison High School, a job she loves. She has a pet parrot with attitude. And there’s a handsome math teacher who wants to be more than just friends. But everything changes when a defiant, disruptive tenth grader walks into her classroom.

With a smart mouth and a swagger to match, Michael Tayler is a problem for Jenna from the very first day. His school record screams troublemaker, and Jenna wonders if the new year is already doomed. But when she reads Michael’s first poetry assignment, she recognizes it for what it truly is: a cry for help.

Michael’s presence sets into motion a chain of events that turns Jenna’s perfect life upside-down and threatens to destroy her career. Faced with a challenge unlike anything she’s ever known, Jenna commits to doing what no one has done for Michael Tayler before.

Lissa Weinstein made a career of helping others understand the nature of learning disabilities, but when her own son was diagnosed with dyslexia, she found herself just as frustrated and confused as the parents she counseled. In their own words, Lissa and David Weinstein express the confusion, fear, faith and love they found on a journey that taught David to read, and brought mother and son closer than they had ever been.

“Steer your students toward academic, social, and emotional success regardless of their learning styles, ability levels, skills, and behaviors. This book provides strategies and activities to differentiated instruction, engage reluctant readers and writers, boost organization and study skills and more.” — Learning Journal

In this practical handbook for parents, clinical psychologists Brooks and Goldstein draw on their considerable experience working with children and families to demonstrate that parents’ core goal should be to instill in their children a sense of inner recourse. “A resilient child is an emotionally healthy child, equipped to successfully confront challenges and bounce back from setbacks,” they contend, and to this end they provide 10 parenting “guideposts” for nurturing the kind of resilience that helps children thrive.

The goal of this book is to help readers recast the paradigm they use to think about the condition, encouraging them to help ADHD kids develop their unique gifts. It begins with an overview of current ADHD diagnosis including definitions and a sample of a case study. Each subsequent chapter reframes certain ADHD symptoms in a positive way and reinforces this transformation with awareness exercises designed to increase the appreciation of the child’s traits.

Besides being a football coach at his Michigan High School, Mike Kersjes taught special education classes, dealing with children whose disabilities included Tourette syndrome, Downs Syndrome, dyslexia, eating disorders and a variety of emotional problems. One autumn Kersjes got the outlandish idea that his students would benefit from going to Space Camp, where, in conjunction with NASA, high school students compete in a variety of activities similar to those experienced by astronauts in training for space shuttle missions. There was only one problem: this program had been specifically designed for gifted and talented students, the best and the brightest from America’s most privileged high schools. Kersjes believed that, given a chance, his kids could do as well as anybody, and with remarkable persistence broke down one barrier after another, from his own principal’s office to the inner sanctum of NASA, until Space Camp opened its doors, on an experimental basis, to special ed students. After nine months of rigorous preparation, during which the class molded itself into a working team, they arrived at Space Camp, where they turned in a performance so startling, so surprising, that it will leave the reader breathless. A truly triumphant story of the power of the human spirit.