Classroom Language Skills for Children With Down Syndrome. A Guide for Parents and Teachers Topics in Down Syndrome

Editorial Review
Language is the foundation for learning and school success. This is true for all students, including children with Down syndrome. Inclusive school settings provide children with Down syndrome great opportunities to improve their communication development— speaking, writing, listening, and following spoken instructions. But these same opportunities create real challenges for them because of wide-ranging skill levels and abilities in language and speech.

Libby Kumin, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is a leading expert on Down syndrome and its impact on communication development. Her new book covers every aspect of a child’s language needs in school from kindergarten- age through early adolescence. Early chapters provide an overview of the characteristic communication problems associated with Down syndrome, their underlying causes, and how they can affect a child in school. Later, the book explains how to address communication needs directly in a child’s IEP, and then goes into detail about the best strategies for adapting school work and teacher-student communication in an inclusive classroom.

CLASSROOM LANGUAGE SKILLS FOR CHILDREN WITH DOWN SYNDROME emphasizes the crucial role teachers and speech-language pathologists play. It explains how to make adaptations to curriculum, verbal instruction, classroom routines, and written assignments. The book discusses ways to enhance social communication between children with Down syndrome and other students during class, lunch, and recess. Also covered is the use of augmentative communication methods for children with Down syndrome who are non-verbal or rarely use speech.

As an added bonus, there are numerous forms and checklists for parents such as an IEP planner, home-school communication tips, samples of visual prompts, graphic organizers, and worksheet adaptations. Overall, this guide offers parents an in-depth overview of their child’s language skills in school, while providing teachers and SLPs with useful ideas and adaptations that will help them meet the communication needs of their students with Down syndrome.
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Customer Reviews

Excellent Guide for both Teachers and Parents

2001-12-21
This book clearly explains how to understand and successfully navigate the many complicated intricacies of school system practices, federal regulations, and classroom environments, for helping children with Down syndrome, and other children with special needs in this area, to develop language skills during their elementary school years. This book is a complete and easy to understand volume, explaining how language skills are developed, and offering developmental solutions that can be tailored to each student's needs. There are numerous and helpful tools, such as worksheets and practical examples, for creating effective teaching and classroom participation practices. In summary, I found this book to be a wonderful and essential guide to state-of-the-art practices for teaching the critical skills of Classroom Language and Communication to children with Down syndrome.

Classroom Language Skills for Children with Down syndrome

2005-09-24
Wonderful book, too many great ideas to list.

A must have!

2003-09-09
While written specifically for children with Down Syndrome, this book is an excellent source of information for any parent of a child with a language impairment, advocate or teacher. It clearly encompasses best practices in the provision of language services to students with language impairments and gives valuable-- and specific-- insights and advice on the design of IEPs and curriculum. The language is clear and accessible to those without professional training or certification in speech and language pathology. My non-Down Syndrome child has a language impairment and I am involved in professional ESE advocacy; I use this book extensively in training parents on SLP issues, best practices, delivery models , and the development of meaningful IEPs. I also suspect that an earlier reviewer intended to review another book, this is not a book about reading or phonics, but about the provision of educationally relevant services and development of academic and functional skills for students with communication impairments.

Buy it for your child's teacher!

2002-11-23
This book picks up from where Dr. Kumin's earlier book, "Communication Skills in Children with Down Syndrome" leaves off. Aimed at the elementary and middle school years, this book is about developing good communication and learning skills. Parents and teachers interested in reading skills will want to look at, "Teaching Reading to Children with Down Syndrome," by Patricia Logan Oelwein. I have had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Kumin speak and she is undoubtedly one of the leading expert on communication skills in children with Down syndrome. The book starts with a look at what language skills a child will need in school and then goes on to discuss building a team and a curriculum to reach that goal. The main topic of the book is how to help the child with Down syndrome learn in an inclusive environment. Dr. Kumin shows us that children with Down syndrome can learn and can succeed but they may need to have the curriculum adapted to their needs. For example, she shows how worksheets can be confusing for a child with Down syndrome but she also shows how they can be easily adapted to make them less confusing. Many children fail, not because they don't understand the material but rather because they have trouble following complicated multi-step instructions. One specific example she discusses is math word problems. The complex language of the word problem can be very difficult for the child to understand even though they have no difficulty doing the actual math problem. Dr. Kumin discusses how IDEA requires that children with disabilities be given accommodations in order to help them be fairly assessed. As a parent or a teacher you will want to read this book. The research discussed and the many ideas put forth can help a child succeed and build self confidence where before there was fear and failure. If you are a teacher of a child with Down syndrome, buy this book. If you are a parent of a child with Down syndrome then buy two copies, one for yourself and the other for your child's teacher.

A must have for parents and teachers

2002-09-21
This book is full of information to help parents and teachers adapt the language demands of the classroom to the needs of their child with Down syndrome. There's information on how the teacher can adapt her spoken instructions, written work, and classroom routines for the child with Down syndrome. There's information on figuring out how the speech therapist could best help your child master the curriculum and improve his communication skills--not to mention how to advocate for the type and amount of speech therapy that would most benefit your child. And there's information about how parents can work with teachers to make homework assignments do-able and meaningful for your child, as well as ways to enrich communication development outside of the classroom. I must say that it sounds like the previous reviewer meant to review a different book and mistakenly clicked on this one! Her review seems to be about a book on teaching reading--Classroom Language Skills includes a little information about adapting reading work in the classroom, but goes way beyond that. She obviously didn't read the same book that I did.

It's just "whole language"

2002-09-13
Get a good book on "whole language" if that's the teaching method you want to use. Better yet, use a good phonics-based approach that also emphasizes the "whole word" approach. There's nothing magic in this book for children with Down Syndrome, and the suggested materials are time-consuming to make. My child now reads well, having learned all the "word attack" skills, rather than just one word attack skill, which is what "whole language" amounts to.