Nicola Grove

By fostering an emotional engagement with literature, teachers can encourage children to make subsequent critical evaluations. Ways into Literature is in line with current guidelines and will help practitioners get started straight away by using the book's storylines, character maps, and story frames. It will also help practitioners learn from the experiences of real children and fellow practitioners. Ways into Literature contains photocopiable and CD ROM resources.

Personal stories are the way we develop a sense of who we are, make sense of our experiences and make and sustain relationships. Research shows that people with severe communication difficulties - such as severe and profound learning disabilities, autism and language impairments - find it hard to recall and share the stories of their lives. This handbook draws on fifteen years of research and practice into personal storytelling in adult services and educational settings. Storysharing is a unique, innovative and highly effective approach to enabling the most severely disabled individuals to participate in telling their own stories.

By fostering an emotional engagement with literature, teachers can encourage children to make subsequent critical evaluations. Ways into Literature is in line with current guidelines and will help practitioners get started straight away by using the book's storylines, character maps, and story frames. It will also help practitioners learn from the experiences of real children and fellow practitioners. Ways into Literature contains photocopiable and CD ROM resources.

This text describes the development of augmentative and alternative communication. The focus is not on disabilities, although the atypical developmental paths to language described in this book are caused by a variety of disabilities, but on the developmental achievements of children using augmentative and alternative communication systems. This book is a first attempt to look at the achievements of children using alternative language forms from a broad developmental perspective and discuss how their semantic, grammatical and pragmatic development is promoted through social interactions, both planned and incidental in nature, that take place in particular sociocultural circumstances. The authors use small group data and dialogues to show how the children use grammatical structures and strategies to convey meaning and solve communicative challenges. The overall aim of the book is to inspire a shift towards a developmental understanding of augmentative and alternative communication in both research and clinical practice, leading to new knowledge and a better basis for intervention practices, and thereby to improved social and societal participation for children using augmentative and alternative communication.

A practical literature resource for teachers and therapists working with children and adults with learning disabilities, this new book uses the context of Shakespeare's Macbeth to develop the skills of social cognition. The resource includes practical activities based on the play, a framework for linking skills of social cognition to the drama activities, and case studies of the work in practice with different groups. Through their understanding of the atmosphere, the story line and the language of the play, people with learning disabilities will be able to experience the pleasure and intellectual stimulation of engaging fully with a literary text. The authors explore the drama within the play and its key themes, such as the tension between trust and betrayal, the origins and consequences of desire, the nature of appearance and in particular the problem of knowing what is in another person's mind. They show how these questions are central to the process of forming a social identity, and to the understanding of a `theory of mind'. Participants are helped to develop the key skills of imitation, joint attention and the understanding of mental states. An essential resource for professionals, this book will enable them to develop social skills with people with learning disabilities in creative and effective ways, and to contribute to the move to bring literature to a wider audience.

The first book to make literature accessible to people with learning disabilities, Odyssey Now is a dramatisation of the story of Odysseus through a variety of interactive games for developing communication skills and as a means of implementing a multi-sensory approach. It is designed particularly to include people who have profound, severe or multiple learning disabilites, but it can be used or adapted for any group of adults and children who have communication problems. Suitable for use in schools, colleges, social education centres or the home, it can also be used in mixed ability groups and to promote integration between groups with special needs and non-disabled people. Each interactive game includes: suggestions for suitable music, pictures, colours and other resources to accompany the gamea storylineguidelines for staff membersa summary of the purpose of the gamesuggestions for adapting the game for people with visual impairments. Included with the games are advice on organising such a programme, suggestions for record-keeping and tips for adapting the games.