Focused

I’ve been involved with kids who have Special Needs for most of my life. I was a foster parent, worked at California School for the Deaf, and was a substitute teacher in many Special Ed classes, to name only a few ways I’ve done that.

But the book, Focused, by Alyson Gerber, gave me a better understanding of what it’s like to have ADHD than I’ve ever had. ADHD is Attention Deficit Disorder, a condition that makes it extremely difficult to focus on one thing.

Clea, the main character in this book, has that disorder, although she doesn’t know it. 

The story is well written and the plot kept me turning the pages.

I highly recommend Focused to middle grade readers because they would enjoy reading it and also learn to understand kids they may know who have ADHD.

I Have a Voice

Anyone who knows me is aware that I've cared about Special Needs, especially in kids, for most of my life. But the book, I Have a Voice by Joni Klein Higger and Flora Zaken-Greenberg, Ph.D, is about a child with a condition I'd never heard of before.

It's called Selective Mutism.

Jamie, the main character, is a young girl who can't talk in social situations, and she'll be starting Kindergarten soon.

Her mother takes her to a therapist who helps her overcome her fear of speaking.

This book will be especially helpful to kids with similar conditions, and I'm sure lots of doctors, therapists and Special Education teachers will want to have copies.

The information at the end of the book by Dr. Zaken-Greenberg about selective mutism will be especially interesting to adults who work with children.

Joni Klein-Higger has written the book in a friendly style so ordinary kids will also enjoy the story as it helps them become more understanding of others.

The illustrations by Eileen Goldberg are cheerful and help make the book fun to read.

Footer Davis Might Be Probably Is Crazy

Susan Vaught has written an exciting book. The plot involves danger and possible murder, but it's appropriate for middle grade readers.

The main character, Footer Davis, has a mother who is mentally ill and wonders if she might be mentally ill herself because of the strange things and possibilities she's dealing with.

But I don't just like this book because it involves a special need even though I often review books about those. It has believable characters and readers can't help caring about the girl who is telling the story. The plot drew me in and I couldn't put the book down until I finished reading it.

I recommend it highly.

Helping With a Problem

I don't often blog about my own books, but this one is special to me and I'd love to have more people read it because it might help kids with special needs.

Kids with any kind of special needs tend to get ignored or bullied in school.

I've cared about children like that since I was a child myself when I was sent to a convalescent home because of my asthma and met lots of kids with various disabilities. (Yes, I know that term isn't politically correct anymore but I was a child long ago.)

I wrote Signs of Trouble to help today's children understand what it's like to have a learning disability and, hopefully, to realize that kids who have special needs aren't necessarily very different from everyone else.

Since the kids in the book use what they've learned about safety rules to solve their problem, all youngsters can benefit from that reminder.

At the end of the book I included suggestions for parents and teachers to help children learn how to be safe and to understand others who have learning disabilities.

I hope that book will make a positive difference by doing that.

My Favorite Child

If you're a writer you probably know writing a book is similar to birthing a baby in some ways. It can be painful, especially if you get rejections, and takes a lot of effort, but it's joyful and amazing to hold the result when the book has been published. And the work has only begun because you have to   promote the book. At least that usually doesn't take as many years as raising a child.

I've had four books for kids published, but one of them is my favorite. It's Signs of Trouble.

Anyone who knows me is probably aware that I care a lot about people, especially kids, with Special Needs. I met lots of children like that when I was a kid myself and sent to the Stanford Convalescent Home because of my severe asthma. That experience has influenced the rest of my life.

Signs of Trouble is for young children but it's loosely based on field trips I took while working as an aide in a Special Ed class for older kids. In the book the main characters get separated from their class on a field trip and use what they've learned about safety rules and recognizing signs to get back with them. Of course nobody ever got separated from the class on the field trips the real class took.

The book also contains some educational information and suggestions for activities at the end.

My tagline is "Opening Eyes, Opening Hearts" and I hope this book helps open the eyes and hearts of the kids who read it or have it read to them. It's available online and through distributors to bookstores.

Firegirl

Tony Abbott has written a powerful book for kids!

Firegirl is about Tom, who is shocked when a terribly scarred new girl comes into his seventh grade class. Like all his classmates, he is horrified by her appearance and doesn't want to think about how she was burned that badly. As the other kids do, he avoids her.

But gradually Tom begins to approach Jessica, at least in private. And they sort of become friends although he still finds her appearance disturbing.

While not many kids are severely burned and disfigured like Jessica, many kids with various special needs are in similar situations because "normal" kids are uncomfortable or even afraid around them.  Sometimes the same thing happens to those who are different in other ways, such as their race or the language they speak.

I hope this book helps a lot of people understand it's what's on the inside that counts the most and to accept others who are different from themselves.

Why Do They Appear?

Although I didn't plan it, all of the books I've had published seem to deal with Special Needs in some way.

In The Peril of the Sinister Scientist one of the main characters uses a wheelchair.  

Signs of Trouble is about kids with learning disabilities who get separated from their Special Ed class on a field trip.  

Secret Service Saint isn't specifically about  Special Needs, but the main character secretly helps someone who is sick.

Slime & All is about a giant, talking worm who wants to be accepted and lots of kids with physical, mental, or emotional limitations can identify with him.

And I have a story in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book, I Can't Believe My Dog Did That, about a deaf dog who helps a child.

So, why do things like that keep appearing in my writing?

Well, when I was a kid I had severe, chronic asthma and was sent to a convalescent home where I met lots of kids with handicaps. (Yes, I know that term isn't politically correct now. Too bad.)

In high school I volunteered with the local Society for Crippled Children. Later I worked at California School for the Deaf so my husband and I raised several Deaf foster kids who had various special needs. I worked as an aide in a Special Education class, then became a substitute teacher and worked in lots of other Special Ed classes.

I guess all that experience somehow got into my subconscious. Those "Special" people have been part of my life for so long they pop up in my mind when I'm writing. They aren't unusual to me.

I wish everyone would feel that way and treat them as they do everyone else.

Rules

I recently read Rules by Cynthia Lord and absolutely loved it! The book is about a girl who must deal with an autistic brother but it's also about friendship, relationships between kids, and belonging.

Rules won the Schneider Family Book Award in 2006. That award is for books that help readers understand and accept people with disabilities and it certainly deserves the award. (One of my books, Signs of Trouble was nominated for that award in 2010, but didn't win.)

I love Cynthia Lord's book and hope lots of middle grade kids will read Rules.

The Running Dream

I've read a few books by Wendelin Van Draanen before, and thought they were okay, but not anything very special. They were in the Sammy Keyes detective series for young readers. But I think her newer book, The Running Dream, is a great one.

This YA (Young Adult) novel is about Jessica who loves to run and excels at that sport until she's injured and must have her leg amputated below the knee.

The book portrays what it must actually be like for someone to loose the ability they care about the most.

Then Jessica must learn to walk again and manage to hobble around on an artificial leg and all that is also portrayed accurately and pulls the reader in to the emotions involved.

But the reason I like the book so much is that it doesn't stop there.

Jessica becomes friends with another girl who must spend her life in a wheelchair and... well, I don't want to spoil the plot for readers by giving away the challenges and excitement in the rest of the story.

Besides the exciting - make that VERY exciting - plot, accurate portrayal of a sport and medical treatments, and believable characters I loved this book because it accomplishes something I wish I could do. My tagline is "Opening Eyes, Opening Hearts" and I hope to do that by helping everyone understand that people with special needs or different in other ways are people first.

In this page-turner book Van Draanen reaches my goal.

Sports for Special Kids

Kids with special needs often get left out of activities, but a friend just told me about this Little League program:
http://www.littleleague.org/learn/about/divisions/challenger.htm

They're starting a group in Albany and Berkeley, CA that's free for the kids - except for buying the uniforms and gear. I don't know if that's true of the program in other areas or not, but it's worth checking into.

What If...?

What if you had a baby and discovered it had a neurological condition that meant the only language it would ever be able to learn was Mandarin Chinese? If you lived in China or already knew that language it wouldn't be much of a problem. But if you lived in the US, Canada, or western Europe and didn't know that language what would you do?

Would you forbid your child to use it, hoping the diagnosis was wrong? Or would you do everything possible to learn Mandarin yourself and find situations where your little one could interact with others who use that language?

If you were a smart and loving parent of course you would choose the second option.

Not too long ago that's the sort of choice parents had to make when they learned their children were couldn't hear. For a long time the philosophy was that forbidding deaf children to use Sign Language would motivate them to learn to speak and read lips.

A hundred years ago when lots of kids lost their hearing due to infections and diseases after they had already been hearing and perhaps using spoken language that approach might have worked for some of them. But by the mid twentieth century medical advances had made it very rare for people to loose their hearing for those reasons.

Instead, most deaf children were born that way because of prenatal damage and forbidding them to learn Sign Language meant they would have no exposure to language at all. Of course some deafness is hereditary, but kids from Deaf families would learn to sign from their parents.

When I started working at California School for the Deaf in the 1960s I was one of the first people who knew American Sign Language who was allowed to work with the young children. At first the kids who were not from Deaf families had tantrums all the time, but as soon as they learned to sign the tantrums stopped.

Different People

In the distant past most humans only saw people different from themselves if they were being invaded by enemies. I guess that's why so many people  today are still uncomfortable and even afraid when they encounter anyone who is different.

Racial prejudice is only one thing that shows this discomfort. I've been amazed to see lots of instances when people seem to be afraid of somebody with special needs.

A few years ago when I was trying to choose a tag line for my website my friends helped me figure out that most of my writing involves helping people understand and accept others who are different. For that reason the tag line I chose is "Opening Eyes, Opening Hearts."

If only we would all learn to look below the surface we'd realize that most people are really not that different from ourselves. No matter their culture, background, political views, economic situation or physical problems, we are more alike than different on the inside. And if we would only all realize that, the world would be a much better place.

What For?

About a year ago I was trying to figure out a tag line that would apply to all the writing I do. The one factor that has been consistent in both my writing and my life is caring about people who are different, often because of special needs, and helping others to understand and accept them. Maybe that's because I had severe chronic asthma as a child and was often teased and bullied.

The tag line I decided to use is "Opening Eyes, Opening Hearts" and I hope my books do that for kids. The Peril of the Sinister Scientist has a protagonist who doesn't know who his father is and features another character who uses a wheelchair. Secret Service Saint shows the young man who later became Saint Nicholas helping people dealing with illness and poverty. And Signs of Trouble, my newest book, is about kids with learning disabilities who get separated from their class on a field trip. Besides helping children understand learning disabilities that book also shows them ways to stay safe themselves.

Soon I'll be going back to substitute teaching and will probably work in a lot of Special Education classes because of my experience in that area.

I hope both my writing and my teaching will help to open people's eyes and hearts.

Special Needs

Several years ago I was advised to start a second blog about special needs and did so. Since I'm a techno-idiot (could that be considered a disability?) I couldn't figure out how to link that blog to other social networking sites without unlinking this one, so it got almost no hits and I've posted to it less and less often.

Special needs are one of the things I care about deeply and I really want to share some of the things I've put on that blog in the past. I could send them directly to Facebook or widen the focus of this blog and repost some of them here, but I can't decide which is the best thing to do.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Another Good Book

I just finished reading Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin. She's a well known autistic woman who does a fascinating job of describing how her mind works and how it may differ from "normal' people's minds. If you've read previous blog posts here you probably know I'm fascinated with language and brain development, and I've spent a lot of time with people who have various special needs. Grandin's book includes all those topics, so it's no surprise that I enjoyed reading it a lot.