Spotlight on Some New Additions to the CDR!

Choosing Education Goals– Teacher’s Manual and Student Lessons

“The lessons and materials in each package provide students school and community-based experiences to help them identify their interests, skills, and limits. The lesson sequence is flexible to fit into the school's existing curriculum and schedule. A student video entitled, Choosing Goals to Plan Your Life, introduces the concepts by showing high school students using the choosing goal process across the three transition areas.”

Choosing Personal Goals– Teacher’s Manual
"The lessons and materials in each package provide students school and community-based experiences to help them identify their interests, skills, and limits. The lesson sequence is flexible to fit into the school's existing curriculum and schedule. A student video entitled, Choosing Goals to Plan Your Life, introduces the concepts by showing high school students using the choosing goal process across the three transition areas"

Take Action: Making Goals Happen, Grades 6-12
“Educators use the Take Action lessons to teach students the crucial skills for attaining their goals. The lesson package consists of a student video, Take Action, teacher lessons plans, and student worksheets. Students learn to break their long-term goals into short-term goals that can be accomplished in a short time period. Lessons teach students to plan how they will attain their goal by deciding: a standard for goal performance. a means to get feedback among other goals"

Transitions to High School:DVD and Instructional material for students with learning differences

"In an unscripted interview format, five high school students with specific learning disabilities and/or attention deficit disorder speak about their school and transition experiences. Juxtaposed with their comments two years earlier, the students outline the steps to a successful transition from elementary or middle school to high school.”

Health, safety, and Nutrition for the Young Child
"Research-based information has been used to make practical suggestions. for promoting the well-being of young children in this best-selling book on the subject. Health, Safety & Nutrition for the Young Child emphasizes the critical relationship that exists among these three areas and the important role teachers and parents play in helping children establish healthy lifestyles.”

Steps to Self-Determination - Helping Adolescents Learn to Achieve their Goals
"Steps to Self-Determination is focused on helping students gain knowledge and skills that will allow them to increase their ability to achieve their goals in a variety of environments. This Instructor’s Guide for the Steps to Self-Determination curriculum includes an introductory section and lesson plans”

To access the CDR Library catalog, please click on this link

"A Best Friend for James" Review by Kelly

Kelly’s Article

“A Best Friend for James”, written by Jeannie E. Casey Thomas with Rae Thomas and illustrated by Judy Doudoukjian and James Thomas, is about a boy named James who always wanted a pet cat.  He loves animals.  His first cat he had used to hiss at him and would never let him pet it.  Then his dad brought home a new cat he rescued from his job.  He named that cat Cocoa.  Because he was sweet like cocoa.  Every day when James was at school Cocoa would sleep in James’s chair.  And when he came home from school Cocoa would come up to him and purr at him.   At night Cocoa would sleep in his bed next to him.  James accidently let the cat outside when he went to play.  The cat was missing for a week.  He looked everywhere in the house but Cocoa wasn’t there.  He looked outside.  He looked around for the cat.  Then he found the cat stuck in the vent.  It was a good book.  But I wish it could have been longer story.  It was too short.    

To learn more, please click on the above title.

To access the CDR Library catalog, please click on this link.

Kelly Doyle Book Review

"Very Shy" written By Barbara Shook Hazen and illustrated by Shirley Chan is about a girl named Nancy who is Very shy.  She always wanted to hide out.    She has a hard time speaking up for herself.  She has a special place where she felt safe.  She has 2 friends who lived down the street from her.  Their names are Amy and Andy.  They have been friends ever since they were babies.  And they liked her even though they disagreed with each other.  She loves to pretend that she could be anything she wanted in fantasy land.  But she could only do that in her own room.  I love this book because this book reminds me of me when I was little.  And now when I’m in my 30’s.  I feel like Nancy because I still feel very shy.  But only when I’m around one person.  I wish I knew why I’m shy around one person  and I’m not shy around everybody else.  But the other people I’m talking about are people I know.  I’m only shy around new people and that 1 person but that’s it.  Nobody else.  I have a special place where I feel safe.  In my room in front of the TV.  I only watch DVD’s.  Because 1. I don’t have cable.  And 2. Because I don’t want cable.  That is my fantasy land where I can pretend that I can do everything that I see on my DVD’s.       

To access the CDR Library catalog, please click on this link.

Kelly Doyle Book Review

"No Time for Me" written by John M. Barrett is about a kid named Jimmy who feels left out of his family. He has a little sister named Kim and his parents. They both have jobs. They are lawyers. His parents are so busy with their jobs that they didn’t know that Jimmy was upset because he couldn’t see his parents that much. So that’s why he feels left out of his family. That’s why the book is called "No Time for Me." I loved this book. It was really good. The book made me cry because a long time ago when I was a kid, teenager and an adult I felt left out of my family. But I think everybody feels that way sometimes.

Book Review: Parallel Play

In researching Asperger's syndrome, which is the central focus of Tim Page's new memoir of childhood, Parallel Play, I found a lot of conjectural lists of famous people who may have had this condition, along with evidence to support the conjecture: it took Leonardo 12 years to paint the Mona Lisa's lips; Louis IV, king of France, bathed once a year; Bill Gates's first invention, Traff-o-Data, was a device that counted the number of cars passing a point in a road; George Washington so feared being buried alive that he ordered that his body be laid out three days prior to burial, so as to make sure he was really dead. There are also apparently confirmed cases of Asperger's among notable living people, including Dan Aykroyd, Satoshi Tajiri (creator of Pokemon), and Steven Spielberg.

Early on, in one of the very best descriptions I've come across of the way the Aspie minds works, Page writes of himself as a child:

"Caring for inanimate objects came easily. Learning to make connections with people -- much as I desperately wanted to -- was a bewildering process, for they kept changing.... Not only did I not see the forest for the trees; I was so intensely distracted that I missed the trees for the species of lichen on their bark."

He proceeds to document this social impediment in hilarious, excruciating, and sometimes moving anecdotes. The book reproduces a stick drawing he did of himself when he was 11, and you would swear the artist couldn't have been more than 5, so primitive is the rendering. Not only that, but this scarecrow is under attack from a bomb, TNT, a knife, a bullet, a grenade, and a rattlesnake, even though his word balloon says, "Everyone loves me" and he is wearing a crown. At the age of 3, he found the death of his grandfather so profoundly upsetting that he became obsessed with the idea of mortality. His first autobiography, written at age 9, he calls "a decidedly curious few pages devoted almost exclusively to the losses I had sustained."

If you read Page's piece in The New Yorker a couple of years ago, that may be all you need. Like more and more books these days, this one is pretty short and feels truncated -- you may expect a fuller picture of the author's more recent life than the one sketched here. But if you didn't read the magazine piece and you are at all curious about this increasingly recognized condition, or why your neighbor won't meet your eyes, or some people enjoy routine so much, then...well, then, you might also like to know -- as Tim Page himself might tell you, with his admirable humor and self-awareness -- that the galleys of Parallel Play measure exactly 8 1/2 by 5 1/2 inches.

To read the full review, follow the link in this post's title.

Book Review by Kristin Florian

Head Injury: The Facts 2nd edition
By D. Gronwall, P. Wrightson, and P. Waddell

This is a reference guide mostly for those taking care of a loved one who has had a head injury. The book is divided into sections, which can be quickly referenced or read all the way through. Starting with the effects of a head injury, the book goes through all the stages including the hospital visit, leaving the hospital, and recovery in the long-term . The progress of three cases is sprinkled throughout the book and correspond with each section. Names have been changed to protect identity. Samuel is an eleven year old boy who falls while trying on his new rollerblades, Jonas is a twenty year old carpentry apprentice who gets into a car crash, and Pauline is a middle aged Lawyer who is hit by a load falling from a delivery truck. A nice feature in each section is a text box which summarizes the content. This guide is well organized and seems to be comprehensive . It explains many of the issues that come up with brain injury and suggestions for coping and improving the situation.