Let Them Thrive: A Playbook for Helping Your Child Succeed in School and in Life

Author(s)

Katie Novak, Ed.D.

Date

2017

About the Book

Bestselling author Katie Novak is back with an engaging UDL primer for parents that shows them how to support and advocate for learning opportunities that leverage their children’s strengths and interests.

Let Them Thrive will show you the most effective strategies for supporting your children based on research and best practices in the learning sciences. Why is this important? Because, as Katie writes in her introduction, “as parents, we can use all the help we can get. Parenting is exhausting, and sometimes thankless work, but it’s also the most rewarding job in the world when we get things right. Although our kids are wildly different from one another, we are all working toward the same goal: children who grow up to be happy and successful adults.”

Let Them Thrive by Katie Novak is available in paperback ($15.00, 170 pages, ISBN: 978-1930583160) and EPUB ($15.00, ISBN: 978-1930583177) format.

Table of Contents

Praise for Let Them Thrive

In an engaging and conversational voice, Novak shares valuable tips about how parents can become informed partners in the effort to improve education for all learners, especially those with disabilities. She offers specific classroom-based examples of how teachers can customize their lessons to meet individual students’ needs. Throughout the book, she makes the case for why parents and caregivers are so important to this process.

Universal design for learning (UDL) is an elegant framework for addressing the quite natural differences among learners in curriculum design. In this highly readable book, Katie Novak lays out UDL principles and practices in a plainspoken and useful way, showing how inclusive education really works in the classroom and at home.

More praise for the book

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Different Kids, Different Sizes
• Chapter 2: Turning On the Brain So It Can Learn
• Chapter 3: The Value of Variability
• Chapter 4: Why Choice Isn’t Just Nice, It’s Necessary
• Chapter 5: What Teachers Are Up Against
• Chapter 6: UDL in Action
• Chapter 7: Raise Those Expectations
• Chapter 8: A Call to Action
• Endnotes
• For Further Information
• Index

More Praise for Let Them Thrive

While Universal Design for Learning has changed how many educators think about teaching students with disabilities, Let Them Thrive brings UDL’s inclusive message to a broader, general-education audience. This is a very useful tool for helping parents understand UDL and explain it to educators, administrators, and policymakers.

An often engaging guide … the book’s bright metaphors, sample lessons, and anecdotes will make the UDL method appealing, even to readers with no teaching experience.