I Got a D in Salami (Hank Zipzer)

Spending a month on a remote island in Maine with his teasing older brother and grandparents he hardly knows is not Josh’s idea of a great time. But that’s what happens the summer his parents go abroad. Twelve-year-old Josh, who has dyslexia, can’t do anything right in his grandfather’s eyes, and is constantly compared to his perfect bookish brother, Simon. So Josh secretly plans to run away back to New Jersey. However, despite gruff Gramps, Josh finds himself captivated by life on Sea Island and all of the challenges it offers him. Plus, Josh discovers unexpected romance and kinship with a young visitor. His biggest challenge, though, comes at the end of the summer when he faces a life-threatening emergency and uses skills he didn’t know he had to lead the rescue.

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.

Today’s parents are increasingly concerned about the reading and spelling skills taught in schools and are taking charge of their children’s education. Full of ideas and suggestions — from innovative preschool exercises to techniques that older children can use to increase reading speed and comprehension — Straight Talk About Reading will instantly help any parent lay a solid foundation for their child’s formative educational years.

The revised, updated, and expanded edition of the classic in the category.

This book outlines a unique and revolutionary program with a phenomenally high success rate in helping dyslexics learn to read and to overcome other difficulties associated with it. This new edition is expanded to include new teaching techniques and revised throughout with up-to-date information on research, studies, and contacts.

This anthology is comprised of two major components: thirteen full-length, autobiographical essays written by persons with learning disabilities and five analytical chapters written by education and psychology scholars. Speaking in terms alternately intimate and analytical, the autobiographical essays each tell of a sustained personal encounter with the challenges and mysteries of living with a learning disability. But these autobiographies are not merely personal, concerned solely with their writers’ private lives. Rather, they are also in various ways consciously analytical, offering astute critical readings of culture and society. The scholarly essays are written by such noted educators and psychologists as Lisa Delpit, Robert Kegan, and Janet Lerner. For any educator or parent of students with learning disabilities.

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.