Learning Disabilities and Life Stories

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.

Nonverbal Learning Disabilities: A Guide to School Success shares the experience of three professionals who work with students with NLD in a variety of settings. Whether it is how to best present a writing assignment or how to ask a classmate to a dance, the authors have come to appreciate these students as creative, informed, and personable.

Josh was living a great life — he knew how to get around who his friends were. In the middle of the school year, though, his family turns that all upside-down by moving to a new neighborhood. Suddenly he has to deal with new kids, a new school, and a nasty bully who makes fun of the way Josh learns. But when the bully needs help, it’s Josh who can save the day.

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.

Sophie is really, really angry! Her sister took her stuffed gorilla. Then Sophie triped on a toy truck. Furious, she slams out the front door and just keeps running. Soon, though, she calms down and starts to notice the ferns and birds. Before long she is ready to be back with her family.

Labeled “dyslexic and profoundly learning disabled with attention and behavior problems,” Jonathan Mooney was a short bus rider — a derogatory term used for kids in special education and a distinction that told the world he wasn’t “normal.” Along with other kids with special challenges, he grew up hearing himself denigrated daily. Ultimately, Mooney surprised skeptics by graduating with honors from Brown University. But he could never escape his past, so he hit the road. To free himself and to learn how others had moved beyond labels, he created an epic journey. He would buy his own short bus and set out cross-country, looking for kids who had dreamed up magical, beautiful ways to overcome the obstacles that separated them from the so-called normal world.

*This book contains adult language.