Schools and Families: Creating Essential Connections for Learning

Note: This is the bound book only and does not include access to the Enhanced Pearson eText. To order the Enhanced Pearson eText packaged with a bound book, use ISBN 0134471881. A practical approach to identifying, understanding, and helping students with language difficulties achieve success in school and beyond. 

With an emphasis on the connection between language and literacy, Teaching Students with Language and Communication Disabilities explores language development and language disorders within the context of specific disabilities. The book is designed to help teachers and other professionals acquire knowledge about language, language development, language disorders, and evidence-based practices for enhancing language skills that will enable them to become more effective teachers and/or clinicians. Student vignettes, teacher perspectives, activities, and literacy sections foster the application of concepts to real classroom situations.

The Fifth Edition includes reconceptualized chapters that use the Response to Intervention (RtI) model as as the framework for classroom-based language assessment and instructional methods. Expanded discussions of emerging teaching technologies and the latest research literature are included throughout the book. The Enhanced Pearson eText version of the text features embedded videos, check your understanding quizzes, and application exercises. Improve mastery and retention with the Enhanced Pearson eText The Enhanced Pearson eText provides a rich, interactive learning environment designed to improve student mastery of content. The Enhanced Pearson eText is:

• Engaging. The new interactive, multimedia learning features were developed by the authors and other subject-matter experts to deepen and enrich the learning experience.*
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Dale Borman Fink, the author of the only book on inclusion of youth with special needs in after school child care, now presents the first book to examine the experiences of children with disabilities participating in youth programs alongside their typical peers. Using a case study technique, he probes into the issues and dynamics that influence the increasing participation of kids with disabilities in such activities as Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and park and recreation programs.

Best Friends, Worst Enemies brings to life the drama of childhood relationships, guiding parents to a deeper understanding of the motives and meanings of social behavior. Here you will find penetrating discussions of the difference between friendship and popularity, how boys and girls deal in unique ways with intimacy and commitment, whether all kids need a best friend, why cliques form and what you can do about them.

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

Author Rondalyn Varney Whitney, a pediatric occupational therapist, is the mother of Zac, a child who suffers from nonverbal learning disorder, or NLD. By definition, NLD is a neurological defect in children who are unable to recognize the nonverbal clues that make up 50 percent of communication. In Bridging the Gap, Whitney seamlessly weaves practical professional advice throughout the account of her passionate involvement with her son. She writes, “I believe that NLD, now thought to be as prevalent as dyslexia, is a difference and not a flaw.” She also warns parents and teachers that kids with NLD are likely to be misdiagnosed as lazy or defiant, so she urges readers to consider both the strengths (high intelligence and advanced verbal skills and memory) and weaknesses (low visual, spatial, and motor skills and deficits in social communication) of these kids.

Fundamentals for the Consumer is designed to enable students to become intelligent consumers of educational research and to introduce basic research principles to those who may eventually be involved in research in their work. Principles for conducting research and criteria for evaluating its overall credibility are presented in a concise non-technical manner. Understanding researcher intent, procedures, and results is promoted throughout the text. Students are shown how to analyze and evaluate the research, and judge the usefulness of the findings for educational practice.