by Kimberly Voss, BS, Bethesda, MD, Woodbine House, Inc, 2005, 334 pp, Paperback, $34.95. This book was created to help educators and parents of children with intellectual and learning disabilities design educational materials to learn academic and self-help skills. Voss applies her knowledge of design and her personal experiences teaching her daughter, Ashley, who has Down syndrome, to give parents ideas of how to effectively teach their children with special needs. Voss and Ashley's educational team found very few appropriate resources that would help Ashley develop the skills she needed to be self-reliant and academically functional. Voss, a self-described “technophobe,” turned to her computer and software design to develop appropriate materials. Along the way, she learned about the importance of text design, layout, choice of images, types of media accessible through software, which she describes in great detail in the first part of the book. Voss then presents her ideas, with very detailed “how to” instructions. Within each tool are ways of adapting the teaching lesson for the child's skill level. For example, the activity on matching objects through a lotto board helped Ashley learn colors and shapes, and then advance to letters, words, and numbers. The “slider” and the “wheel” helped Ashley learn to read, understand word families, and understand basic math skills. Ashley learned to tell time and become more functionally independent with visual schedules. The final chapters focus on activities to improve reading and writing skills and games to help teach academic skills. The end of the book includes a helpful list of websites and stores that sell the needed supplies mentioned in the book and colored photographs of the different designs. The book also comes with a CD-ROM containing templates of the designs (i.e., lotto boards, visual schedules, etc.) in various formats, so one can import the template into a graphics program or Microsoft® Word document. This book contains many creative ideas for hands-on multisensory learning. Most of these ideas are not new, however, they are not intuitive either, and so many parents will find them useful both for home and to take to their child's program. Most of the ideas are supported by personal experience rather than through experimental methods. The instructions on how to produce the learning tools were too detailed and too tied to specific graphic programs, particularly AppleWorks® and FreeHand®, and likely to be outdated with newer software versions. They could be difficult to apply to more commonly used Microsoft® Office programs. The frequent reference to her daughter assures the reader that Voss has much personal experience with developmental disability, but the reader may wonder how well these tools will generalize to other children. Overall, Teaching by Design gives parents and educators great ideas to teach their children academic and self-help skills, but could benefit from references to show empirical support beyond personal experience, and simpler instructions that can be applied easily to commonly used software. Kimberlly Stringer, MD, MPH Jennifer Walton, MD Division of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Philadelphia, PA
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Feb 15, 2011
S Hitam + 5
Open Access
