Succeeding with LD: 20 True Stories About Real People with LD

Peter does well in third-grade math. But, somehow, in writing and spelling, by the time the letters get from his brain to his paper, they get turned around. His Dad thinks he’s lazy. Peter just wants to get sick and stay home from school. It takes the perseverance of a spider named Seymour to help Peter work to overcome his learning problems.

A touching account of one youngster’s struggle in learning to read and the painful journey that he took to gain self-confidence, self-respect, and tremendous success as a human being, as a student, and as an athlete. Benny’s story stands as a tribute to the human spirit and should serve as an excellent resource for students with dyslexia, their parents and their teachers.

Here is a model of reading ideal for striving readers, focused on their personal interests, topic-specific reading, deep background knowledge, contextual reading strategies, and mentoring support. More important, the model moves away from a deficit approach to conceptualize striving readers in a new way. Chapters share success stories of readers who overcome their struggles and highlight instructional strategies and materials you can use to develop activities and lessons for children and adults. Use this research-based model in the classroom or at home to help your striving readers achieve high levels of literacy.

Katie Kelso is sick of being a dork. Now that she’s in seventh grade, she vows that her life will change. She’s going to become a P.K. — a Popular Kid. Soon Katie is up to her neck in problems. Spud Larson, the best looking boy in her class and the leader of the P.K.’s, seems to like her. But so does Brian Straus — sensitive, smart, mysterious Brian. What will happen if her mother turns out to have cancer? And what should she do about the literary magazine? Her teacher wants her to try out for it, but Katie has dyslexia, and she’s probably the worst speller in junior high.

It’s September, which means it’s time for school to start! The alarm rings, but Sarah Jane Hartwell just burrows deeper into her covers, announcing that shes not going, wailing “I dont know anybody, and it will be hard, and … I just hate it, thats all.” Finally, Mr. Hartwell firmly orders her down to breakfast, puts her in the car and drops her off to join the children flooding through the school doors. But is Sarah who you expect her to be?

In America today, 43 percent of our children fall below grade level in reading. In her meticulously researched and groundbreaking work, Diane McGuinness faults outmoded reading systems for this crisis — and provides the answers we need to give our children the reading skills they need. Drawing on twenty-five years of cutting-edge research, Dr. McGuinness presents bold new “phoneme awareness” programs that overcome the tremendous shortcomings of other systems by focusing on the crucial need to understand and hear reliably the sounds of a language before learning to read. Maintaining that any child can be taught to read fluently if given proper instruction, she dramatically reveals how dyslexia and behavior problems such as ADD stem not from neurological disorders but from flawed methods of reading instruction. With invaluable information on remedial reading programs that can correct various ineffective reading strategies, this book is a must for concerned parents, teachers, and others who want to make a difference.