NexGen, 2006, 136 pp., $19.99,
www.cookministries.com/nexgen
Too often our youth ministries have a one-sizefits-all approach, and the thought of teaching children with disabilities scares people away. This book provides attitude checks and tools to help you reach all God’s children.
Let All the Children Come to Me from Cook’s NextGen line will help retrain your brain to look at kids with disabilities as able to learn along with non-disabled kids. Notwithstanding bits of college level teacher-speak that might intimidate your average once-a-month volunteer, plus an inclusion message the authors lay on thick, the book nonetheless is effective at showing how it can work.
Doable suggestions and reproducible worksheets will help train both lay teachers and nondisabled kids to accept, understand and teach kids with disabilities. In chapter 5 and
appendix A you’ll find breakdowns of the most common disabilities (for example, mental retardation, PDD, learning disability, ADHD, autism, blindness, cerebral palsy, deafness, dyslexia) and teaching tips that work well for any class or small group scenario. One chapter is titled “Good Teaching Is Just Good Teaching,” and can be applied to children’s ministry, youth ministry or as public and private school settings. This reviewer gained a fresh, biblical insight to kids with disabilities, which one hopes will carry over into working with all students.
(Also see the review for Learning Disabilities and the Church: Including All God’s Kids in Your Education and Worship by Cynthia Holder Rich and Martha Ross-Mockaatis )
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Danette Matty, freelance writer and 18-year youth ministry volunteer in Minnesota.
