Rediscover Your Love of Reading: Finding Books That Embrace Special Needs Children…
Recently, we have all found ourselves working toward a second month in what my children refer to as ‘captivity.’ Keeping everyone entertained and not hooked up to electronics twenty four hours a day, has been quite a challenging feat, especially when the weather doesn’t permit us to spend time outdoors. Just this morning, I was down in the basement doing laundry and noticed that our bookshelves (wall-to-wall!) could use some serious organization.
I have always been a life-long reader and was probably the only 12 year that spent their Friday nights hanging out at the public library. My mom would drop me off while she did her food shopping and then have to drag me out so that the kind librarians could go home. Throughout the years and over the course of many moves, I have tried to keep some of my absolute favorite titles on hand or rather tucked away in my basement!
Today, as I began to scan my collection of titles, I saw before my my chronological reading life stretched out along the shelves. Before actually becoming a fluent reader, I have vague memories of encircling all of the words that I could recognize with a chubby, red crayon. I noted that when first challenged with the start of ‘girl drama’ in school, I found my way to an array of Judy Blume’s titles, my absolute favorite being “Are You There Go, It’s Me, Margaret,” helped me to navigate the new and uncharted waters of a personal identity and finding one’s voice. I would devour books and would only select titles that were part of a long series. For months, I found myself lost in the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madeline L’Engle, Lois, Lowry, C.S. Lewis, and lest I forget to mention the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series. I recall the boxes of Nancy Drew titles that we inherited from our Aunt Michele decades old, but still so intriguing. Once I began to become a bit more adventurous, I discovered historical fiction and loved many titles written by Scott O’Dell. I can’t recall how many times I read Island of the Blue Dolphins. For months, I carried around a big stick and took walks in the woods, renaming my dog ‘Rontu!’ Then with the onset of a seriously awkward adolescence, I delved deeply into works of Robert Cormier and Paul Zindel. Some of the classics continued to be recycled today are The Chocolate War, Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball! and Confessions of a Teenage Baboon that somehow spoke to my sense of feeling out of place in the midst of my peers group.
Throughout both my life and various academic pursuits, an assortment of genres have ‘spoken’ to me. Some of these amazing works by Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Kahil Gihbran Henry Miller, Ernest Hemmingway, Hermann Hesse, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Willa Cather, Emily Bronte, Joan Didion, Shirley Jackson, Kate Chopin, are juxtaposed with works by Mo Willems, Kevin Henkes, William Steig, CeCe Bell, Laurie Halse Anderson, Katherine Patterson, Ralph Fletcher, R.J. Palacio, and oodles more than I could possibly mention, with every age, there was a personal reading ‘stage.’
C.S. Lewis stated that “We read to know that we aren’t alone.” However, now as both an educator and a parent of a special needs child, I have accrued a new list of book titles, ones that embrace characters with unique and varying abilities. My friend Beth is a librarian and continues to provide me resources that include wonderfully inclusive works that truly represent children and adolescents who struggle to see themselves in print and in the world, so that they too feel less alone. The niche of children and adolescent literature is changing- for the better, within each word, we are helping the world become a more inclusive place to live.
Below please find links to some amazing titles. Happy reading!
~ K.
Here is a link to some of more recent titles for children and adolescents:
https://www.mrsdscorner.com/60disabilitybooksforkids/
https://blog.easterseals.com/reading-list-books-about-disability-for-kids-and-teens/
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/b/books/kids/special-needs-kids/_/N-29Z8q8Zu8s
Resources for parents:
https://bookauthority.org/books/best-special-needs-books
https://achievementcenteroftexas.org/2017/09/21/books-for-parents-of-children-with-special-needs/
