Disabilities Books

I have a 3 year old nonverbal , autistic child. We had heard of this system through a teacher and bought this book. In six months our son now shows us pictures in sentence structures due to this book. it has changed our lives. A brilliant book . Dont miss it

This consists of Phase I - VI, Additional Concepts, Other Goodies and Appendices covering about seventy-five pages. Each phase has three sections, The environment, the training steps and helpful hints.

Phase I - The physical exchange,Phase II - Expanding Spontaneity
Phase III - Picture Discrimination, Phase IV - Sentence Structure, Phase V - Responding to "What do you want?", Phase VI - Responsive and Spontaneous Commenting

PECS was first developed for use with preschool children with autism that had little or no speech. For the first phase there needs to be a reinforcer assessment. This means picking five to eight edibles that the child/student likes. The items preferred would be picked within five seconds. For those items that were picked at least three times remove them and conduct assessment with remaining items. This continues until a pool of three to five preferred items have been determined.

There are diagrams explaining how this system works. The process starts as backward chaining with the trainers delaying the verbal praise until the student has released the picture into the open hand of the trainer. The helpful hints in this first phase discuss finding the right symbol system.

Some will use black and white line drawings or product logos. Then the size of the photo is determined, usually two-inch. The trainer should wear a apron or waist pack to keep the pictures in and purchase lots of velcro!

Phase II has the trainer moving further away from the student and have the student remove the card from the board and hand to the trainer. The trainer can get up to make the student than have to stand up to hand the card. Verbal praise is continued with reinforcement while the exchange is in motion. A helpful hint is now to have a three-ring binder for the cards, as you move to more pictures.

A diagram in the book shows how this process is done in an easy to understand format. Picture-take picture to materials-materials (no interruptions)-take materials to work area (no interruptions)-activity(no interruptions)-get reward-finish activity-get reward-put materials away-take picture-go back to schedule.

This book allows you to get a good visual understanding on how physical dysfunction is effected by injury in the brain. It is a great compliment reading to my neuro text.

Here it is. The latest update for physical disability science within occupational therapy. Whether you are a current student in need of another source, or an experienced practitioner with a desire to go back and check the basics. This updated book will have more than one topic to get you up to speed. I love it, and frequently reference it. It's also nice to know that added emphasis is placed on realistic case studys throughout the book.
Enjoy!!

-Derek Malayeri OTR/L, CA.

Most books I have gotten are written for parents of younger children with Autism. This book helps with the slightly older child (teenager). It has given me a new perspective on how to help my child. I highly recommend this book to all who deal with teens or even younger children with autism. It has really good ideas on how to deal with the behaviors.

Why?

If you are dealing with autisitic youths that have behavioural or emotional challenges.
If you are an educational professional.
It is worth 5 stars it gives you a good scaffold to design your own management plan for a student. With comprehensive background and strategies without wasting your time with fluff.

Why Not?
If you are a parent of an ASD child or teenager then this book may well be pitched to much at the education system.

This is the tome on our monetary system. After reading this you will have knowledge that will shut the mouth of all speculators. What truly lies behind the driving engine of status quo government sleeping with international banking cartel. Sorry to say this edition is impossible to find but here is a link to the authors site for an updated 2 Vol edition.
http://www.piecesofeight.us/Order.html

This book gives a detailed legal (constitutional) argument demonstrating that our present monetary system is a contradiction of what was intended and what is expressed in the U.S. Constitution. The book also describes the legal history of the Supreme Court cases that brought the system to this point.

I was hoping for a book dealing with challenging behavior in a general ed setting. This book is focused on inclusion for those with emotional or developmental disabilities. I returned the book to Amazon for a refund. I'm sure it's a fine book, so I gave it 5 stars to match the other reviewer. It just wasn't the book I needed.

The title of this book does not convey the breadth of topics covered relevant to children of many different ages, the complete description and explanation of a wide variety of behavioral interventions along with expected results. Also good list of other sources of scholarly articles. One slight critique would be that a greater use of footnotes might have made the text a bit more user friendly.

This fascinating and thought-provoking book should be read by anyone interested in disability rights. It presents a variety of views on a challenging topic. The book deals with philosophical issues in understandable terms, and argues for a new paradigm for consideration of prenatal testing.

Different chapters are written by various authors from different backgrounds. Physicians, professors, parents, those with disabilities, therapists and lawyers all contribute to this multifaceted approach to whether or not prenatal testing devalues those with disabilities. Social factors and medical factors are discussed with clarity. This book will cause the reader to question the basis for their pre-concieved beliefs about what it means to have a disability, and will encourage them to look at this issue in a more thoughtful way.

I found this book difficult to put down, and have recommended it to several friends.

(A longer version of this review ran in the January 2001 issue of Ragged Edge magazine.) Does prenatal testing for genetic defects "send a message" to disabled people? Adrienne Asch, the Henry L. Luce Professor of Biology, Ethics and Reproduction at Wellesley College, insists that it does. For two years, Asch and Hastings Center bioethicist Eric Parens engaged a group of scholars, philosophers, ethicists, biologists, physicians, sociologists and educators under the auspices of the Hastings Center to grapple with that question, and the disability rights perspective on prenatal testing in general. This book is the product of that project.

After listening to all the opinions expressed by project members, Asch writes in an essay late in the book that she has not changed her mind. She says that people who choose to abort based on a diagnosis of disability are "allowing a single trait to stand in for the whole, to obliterate the whole." People like Baily -- and they are in the large majority in society -- simply do not believe that aborting a fetus because it will likely have a disability "sends a message" that is bigoted; most do not believe that it sends any message at all. Many do not agree that the provision of more accurate information about disabilities or about living with particular disabilities would make any great difference in their decision to abort a fetus they feared carried a "defect." Even knowing about disabled people and their lives, she would still not want to bear a disabled child if it could be avoided, says Baily. Nor do they buy the "any/particular" distinction articulated by Asch, who has been writing about the disability perspective on reproductive choice for decades. The "any/particular distinction" refers to the difference between the decision to simply not have any child at all at the time -- the decision of someone who becomes pregnant when they were not planning a family and thus seeks an abortion, for example -- and the decision to abort a particular fetus, even when the woman in fact wants a child, when prenatal testing has revealed disability in the fetus. The project, funded in part by a grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, did not reach unanimity on any of the "major claims" of the disability rights movement -- not after five intense two-day intense meetings, not despite ongoing email correspondence among participants, notwithstanding meetings with members of the Society for Disability Studies. So are we simply at that juncture in history in which almost no one outside one's tiny community of thought believes one's critique; before one's ideas are accepted? Is this what it was like in the 1800s to hear perfectly nice, logical people say things which we now we see as hopelessly racist? It's hard to tell. This is an important, though academic, book. It lays out both the disability rights critique from Asch, Marsha Saxton and others, and the reasons why people just don't "buy" the argument that life with a disability is alright, which is really what it comes right down to.

"Using prenatal tests to prevent the births of babies with disabilities seems to be self-evidently good to many people," Asch writes. No matter that critics argue that these beliefs stem from unexamined attitudes about disability; this project shows that when the attitudes are examined they are often found to be fine attitudes -- by those who hold them. In her piercingly honest essay "Somewhere A Mockingbird" (which also appeared in the anthology Bigger Than The Sky: Disabled Women on Parenting (Ragged Edge, Jan./ Feb. 2000), Deborah Kent reports what happens when she and her husband begin to plan having a child, knowing it may be born with Kent's genetic blindness: Despite the closeness of the couple, writes Kent, she had failed to convince her husband, even after their years together, "that it is really okay to be blind." "I will always believe that blindness is a neutral trait, neither to be prized nor shunned. Very few people, including those dearest to me, share that conviction... They cannot fully relinquish their negative assumptions...." "Though they dread blindness as a fate to be avoided at almost any cost," she writes of her family and friends, "they give me their trust and respect. I don't understand how they live without discomfort amid such contradictions."(emphasis ours.) Yet many of the project's participants live with this contradiction seemingly quite well and without question. If there is a theme to be taken away from this volume, it is that society can quite easily live without examining such contradictions. In one of the most sobering essays in the book, Nancy Press writes that "certain silences in the public discourse have actually enabled the routinization and rapid growth of prenatal testing,.... by obscuring or limiting the need for public debate about two topics about which Americans are deeply conflicted but which lie at the heart of prenatal testing: abortion and disability." This book arrives at a time in our society when prenatal testing is becoming routine -- and a duty. As tests for finding ever more genetic traits and predispositions become ever easier to administer, our country's legal hubris being what it is, women will be told to get them done, or else. Sociologist Dorothy Wertz contends that "even if some lines might be drawn in practice they will not make a difference since market and political forces will determine which prenatal tests are offered and in what kind of an atmosphere they will be offered." Biologist Pilar Ossorio points out that "when prenatal tests become part of routine [medical] practice, courts will find that physicians have a duty to offer them." Detailing the strange and horrific outcome, today's "wrongful birth" and "wrongful life" lawsuits (in which the disabled child argues before the court "that her life is worse than non-existence"), Ossorio's chapter is a sober reminder of the road we head down when we reject the disability rights critique of prenatal testing.

This excellent book is a must for those with family members suffering from ADD and LD problems. Such readers will recognize a thread in common with the adult "pretenders" whose stories the author artfully presents. Each vignette recounts a heroic struggle to succeed against imposing odds. A good read!

This book "hooked" me at chapter one when the author recounts her story about how she got into the field. After you read the first chapter, you get the impression that once you enter the world of LD, you have entered the region of the damned, regardless of whether or not you are a student w/the diagnosis, a parent, or a teacher. LD carries a "stigma" that is akin to having the mark-of-the-beast, in some circles. Students are treated like second class citizens, or as if they were going to school in a third world dictatorship, parents are dissed and disregarded, the teachers never get the materials, respect from admin. or peers, and the administrative support they need to make sure these dear children have a decent shot at success.

The Pretenders will open your eyes into this little understood world. At times, it may even make you cry as you reflect upon the pain that students and parents (and adults w/LD) have to endure on a daily basis.

This is the best general guide to the ideas of the disability rights movement that I have read. It takes the better parts of disability rights and feminism and merges them, additionally addressing both how feminism has failed disabled people and the disability movement has failed women. It addresses a wide variety of topics, from everyday attitudes to institutionalization. It talks about disability in a broad political sense while not forgetting or disregarding the personal experiences of disabled people within that context. Unlike many other books I have found on the topic, it is not boring, overly abstract, or dense. It is clear and easier to read than most. When I'm recommending books to people, if I recommend only one book about disability rights it is this one.

Thinking on the subject of Disability has evolved relatively fast within the last thirty or so years. If you are new to Disability Studies it may be good to read a different book like Claiming Disability or No Pity because Pride Against Prejudice is a little older (1989) and it was not written for the purpose of introducing Disability Studies.

For those who are more well read in Disability literature this book has something important to say and it provides a different perspective on social issues which are as relevant today as they were when the book was written. For example: the author places disability issues within the context of the Women's movement and does not shy away from explaining how the Women's movement has failed the Disability movement!

It is written by a British author but the issues addressed in the book are relevant in America.

Pride Against Prejudice is an empowering book.

Princess Jessica was a wonderful surprise for many of our campers. Your considerate story helped make the experience at Camp Heartland for kids with AIDS much more memorable and significant.-Camp Heartland

What a fun book! It was interesting to see how some adults had some intellectual nitpicking to do about this book, but this is a children's book. The story isn't supposed to be told with the style of Faulkner or James Joyce, or the illustrations of Monet. (Do adolescents really critique picturebook artwork like adults?) It's whole point is to entertain and inspire children, and in my experience, it does that very well. The imaginative images of princesses, sea serpents, dolphins, and faraway lands are enchanting, and hold children's attention. But the reason that this book is really great is that it goes where children's books rarely go. It introduces empowered feminine heroes. It pays homage to individuals who look different, who are not the "beautiful people" (this never happened in the fairy stories I read), because they are helpful and courageous, and they are not afraid to reach out. Children need these simple messages, because, guess what? They are children! Girls especially need to hear what this book has to say, to counter the barrage of poor role model images that they are getting everywhere else in this advertising driven age. Give your daughter this book before it's too late. Thank you for writing this book.

This story is part of my daughters Reading book at school. We read it together at bedtime and by the last line I had tears in my eyes. Very touching ending.

As a schoolnurse, this is an excellant book to present both sibling rivalry and disabilities. Patty Jean is jealous over her sister's special treatment by being in a wheelchair. Patty Jean takes the wheelchair one afternoon and she finds out that life in a wheelchair is not as wonderful as it appears. This picture book is a fun way to present a real problem in some students lives.