Specific Disabilities Books

If you are trying to implement RTI, this book and his other one "Response to Intervention" are clear guides for professionals.

Both general and special education teachers and college-level collections catering to them will find essential the second edition of Differentiating Instruction for Students with Learning Disabilities. This offers standards-based teaching techniques that incorporate the latest brain research studies, and offer new information on universal design strategies for the classroom. From teaching tips to reflective teaching and exercises, DIFFERENTIATING INSTRUCTION holds plenty of tested, tried applications suitable for both specialty teaching and the general classroom alike.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

This book is must reading for the child psychiatrist in training or in practice! The title is deceptive it involves much more then just learning disorders it is a comprehensive textbook of child psychiatry! Topics covered include Autism,Tourette's, ADHD, organicity, soft neurological signs, traumatic brain injury, specific learning disability, learning disorders, educational interventions, psychological testing etc.. It will give clinicians a perspective they will not able to achieve reading most child Psych. textbooks. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Jorge J. Villalba, MD, FAACAP.

At one point or another in our careers we are going to be called upon to counsel children who present with learning difficulties and their families.

This book is an excellent resource that will greatly enhance the counselor's understanding of these often mysterious issues. Comprehensive in scope, the authors present the current thinking in the field from the disciplines of education, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience.

Before reading this book, I took for granted the struggles and issues that face disabled people everyday. This book is filled with stories written by real people with disablilities. It also has articles written by leaders who fight for disabled rights. But Enabled in Words is more than just an educational experience. The stories inside really inspired me to be thankful for the good things that I have in my life, and to be mindful that there are people in the world who face difficulties the likes of which I may never fully appreciate. I believe that anyone who reads it will find inspiration in this book.

This book is truly an inspiration. I would reccommend it to anyone who lives with a disability or knows someone who does. Certainly, a lot of time and effort went into collecting these uplifting stories. I especially enjoyed reading former Senator Max Cleland's piece in the forward.

This book makes me think of Jimi Hendrix' 1967 classic, "Are You Experienced?" If not, this stellar work will certainly help you understand the autism/Aspeger's (a/A) experience.

First of all, it is past time to debunk that tired myth about how people with autism don't plan ahead and aren't organized. Not true. Let's just retire that one permanently. If you believe that, I have a nice bridge in San Francisco to sell you along with some oceanfront property in Iowa.

On the contrary, people on the a/A spectrum tend to be organized in thought and behavior to the point of rigidity. I know someone with Asperger's whose photographs are in the exact order in which they appear on the negatives; they are all chronologically organized; books, albums and CDs are alphabetized by artist and further alphabetized by title. How's THAT for organized thinking?

Many people on the a/A spectrum are quite adept at locating discrete objects and polygons in complex drawings; many people on the a/A spectrum excel at completing complex mazes; Tangrams and in "word finding," that is finding smaller words within a longer one.

The photographs do this one justice; the a/A experience is celebrated fully. Instead of reinforcing these foolish myths about autism which help no one and hurt all, this book opens the door to the a/A experience!

As John Lennon said in "Imagine," his 1971 classic, "I hope someday you'll join us and the world will live as one."

This beautiful book is definitely one for the coffee table... large and glossy and full of delicious pictures. It combines the usual characteristics of an art book with the insight of autistic biography and the usual introduction to Asperger syndrome information. In addition to this though it has a very accessible guide to the psychological theories of autism. I identified with the art in it, having produced a similar style of pictures myself in the past (though not as good or as clever). This is an honest and thoughtful celebration of the autistic mind.

This is the best book I have read on the subject for adults with learning disabilities. Shapiro and Rich write in a way that is easily understandable by laymen and also in a way that is highly informative. If you have a learning disability, you can easily relate to their examples of other real people with similar problems and learn how LD problems are diagnosed, what causes the problem and treatment methods, including strategies and drugs. I would certainly reccommend this book for any adult who has a learning disability or simply wants to learn more

At last a book on learning disabilities that you do not need a doctorate in the subject to understand. I highly recommend this book to anyone who needs some practical advice on this subject.

I found this to be one of the most readable psychology texts I have seen. (And I have seen a lot of them.)

I am reading this book for a class and have found it has many useful insights to children who exhibit challenging behaviors in the classroom and what teachers can do to maintain control of the classroom.

The students in my class are very low functioning and I am always looking for activities to do with them to keep them active and to encourage them to interact with each other. This book is filled with great ideas. For each activity described is a suggestion of how the game can be adapted for students with different disabilities. I recommend this book for any special ed. teacher.

This is one of the few books available that provides activities and games for elementary students that can easily be adapted to include students with visual impairments, hearing impairments, and limited mobility. I am a fifth/sixth grade special ed. teacher and have found this book great for giving me ideas of different games I can play with my students. The directions in the book are easy to follow and so far, all games have been a hit with my students (which is quite rare!)

September 1955. Six-year-old Mark O'Brien moved his arms and legs for the last time. He came out of a thirty-day coma to find himself enclosed from the neck down in an iron lung, the machine in which he would live for much of the rest of his life.

How I Became a Human Being is Mark O'Brien's account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. In 1955, he contracted polio and became permanently paralyzed from the neck down. O'Brien describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the bureaucracy of hospitals and institutions, and his adult life as an independent student and writer. Despite his weak physical state, O'Brien attended graduate school, explored his sexuality, fell in love, published poetry, and worked as a journalist. A determined writer, O'Brien used a mouthstick to type each word.

O'Brien's story does not beg for sympathy. It is rather a day-to-day account of his reality?the life he crafted and maintained with a good mind, hired attendants, decent legislation for disabled people in California, and support from the University of California at Berkeley. He describes the ways in which a paralyzed person takes care of the body, mind, and heart. What mattered most was his writing, the people he loved, his belief in God, and his belief in himself.

Mark O'Brien was the subject of the 1997 Academy Award?winning documentary Breathing Lessons. He was a published poet and cofounder of the Lemonade Factory, a California press that published poetry by people with disabilities. O'Brien died in 1999 at the age of forty-nine after completing a draft of How I Became a Human Being . Gillian Kendall is a writer. She has contributed to both Outright Radio and Sun magazine; one of her short stories appeared in The Student Body, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

"How I became a human being" is a great read. It is one of those books that I had trouble putting down, once I had begun reading it. Mark O'Brien is a truely inspirational person, who proves that if you set your mind to something, you can achieve whatever you want to in life despite, in his case, extraordinary obstacles. I simply can't imagine being paralysed from the neck down. What amazed me while reading the book, was that at times, I forgot that Mark had such a profound disabilty, with his humour, personality and love coming through in his writing.
My only criticism of this book is that there was no mention at any point of Mark's realization that he would never walk again, that he would forever be reliant on others and indeed be reliant on an iron lung. When was he first told he would never walk again? How did he and his parents react to this news? Did he live in hope that by some miracle, he would walk again or did he accept that this was the way he was going to be for the rest of his life? After finishing the book, I felt that these questions were left largely unanswered.
Also, as Mark O'Brien died in 1999, I felt that it would have been good for the co-writer to have written an epilogue regarding the circumstances of his death. Throughout the book Mark comes close to death on several occasions and he talks about death in quite some detail, but the reader is left with no details of the actual circumstances in which he died.
Despite these criticisms, I recommend this book highly. It is an amazingly inspirational read.

After reading this book I can only hope that I will be lucky enough to have a student with severe and multiple disabilities in my classroom some day. The book has a lot of practical ideas, simple and easy to use and at the same time there are a lot of references to actual research. This is a very inspiring book!

Dr. Downing does a wonderful job in this book of offering
teachers practical information. She has a section devoted to
each stage of education from preschool to high school & within
each section offers specific tips on how to modify both the
environment & the curriculum. She also addresses common
concerns such as dealing with disruptive behavior & a lack of
adequate planning time or support staff resources.
A great addition to any teacher's resource library!

This is the third book from Brookes publishing that I have used--the others are Road to the Code and Road to Reading. Like the others, this book provides primary teachers in grades K - 3 with lessons to use in small group targeted instruction in the five components. I especailly like this text because of the word lists which make it easy to implement the lessons to meet the needs of struggling readers. I would highly recommend this book.

The collaborative work of Professor Diane Haager (Charter College of Education, California State University, Los Angeles), Joseph A. Dimino Research Associate, Instructional Research Group, Signal Hill, California), and Michelle Pearlman Windmueller (Elementary School Administrator, Los Angeles Unified School District, Los Angeles, California), Interventions For Reading Success" offers an extensive series of lessons in reading and literacy. Each lesson takes from 20 to 30 minutes and focuses upon early literacy issues such as phonological awareness, the alphabetic principles, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Enhanced with more than one hundred 'learning friendly' activities and interventions (including goals, materials, word lists, and teacher steps), "Interventions For Reading Success" includes guidelines, assessment and intervention planning guidance, 75 photocopiable take-home activities parents can use to reinforce their child's basic reading skills, and practical tips for teachers on implementing intervention in the classroom setting. A comb-bound book that lays open on a flat surface for each of use, "Interventions For Reading Success" is a welcome and recommended resource for classroom teachers working with student from kindergarten through the third grade to develop and improve their reading skills.