Free teaching resources with slides | Age 9-14 | Introduction to disability

Lucy and James Catchpole

Children will come across disabled characters at school – Captain Hook, Clara in Heidi, Tiny Tim. These are disabled characters as dramatic tools, they have nothing to do with real disabled people. The lessons young readers learn from these classics are odd and unhelpful – fresh air cures disability, disability is evil, disability needs charity. These aren’t the messages we want young people to take into their interactions with disabled people, or – worse – apply to themselves.

Do scroll through some sample pages of our plan above. The (free) pdfs are further down the page.

Do disabled writers have a place in the curriculum? We need them to – to redress this balance. Owning It: Our disabled childhoods in our own words is our anthology – three disabled editors (us, and Jen Campbell), plus twenty disabled authors, and one disabled illustrator. There are a wealth of real stories here, from real disabled people – not fanciful creations designed to elicit emotion.

Now, we’ve made these lesson plans to use alongside Owning It – with the help of teachers and wheelchair users Katie Renker (UK), and Rebekah Taussig (US). We’ve come up with a few things.

• Introduction to disability – with slides.
• Comprehension questions for age 9 to 11. Extracts from ‘Faking It’, by James.
• Questions for age 11 to 14, with two more extracts – by Christa Couture and Daniel Sluman, also amputees. Focus on the authors’ perspectives on prosthetics and mobility aids.
• Further suggestions for using Owning It in classrooms, broken down into themes.

We hope these learning resources will be used in the UK and internationally. In the UK, Years 5 and 6 (KS2) are upper primary, age nine to eleven – Grade 4 and 5 in the US. The ‘Faking It’ extract and comprehension is designed as practice for the KS2 SATs reading assessment. Years 7, 8 and 9 (KS3), US Grade 6, 7 and 8, covers age eleven to fourteen. Thoughts and tips from Rebekah Taussig on use in US schools are included. Do download both plan and slideshow, or nothing will make sense!

The creators

I thought I’d put this here – all the creators of Owning It, starting with editors me (Lucy) and James, Jen Campbell, illustrator Sophie Kamlish, and then the authors. Working with so many disabled authors and creators has been a genuine honour.

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The book

If you don’t have a copy of the book yet, it’s available in all the usual places, and from our local – Blackwell’s – who deliver internationally, with postage included in the price.

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