Customer Reviews

The Best Worst Brother

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

My family and I really enjoyed this book. It was easy to follow for my kids (2-6 years) and it had a very valuable lesson to learn about their little brother who also was born with Down Syndrome. The pictures are very true to life. It helps give some insight into our son's future and how we can handle behaviors in a positive way. Thanks. We need more books like this one.

I have a son with DS and "typical" daughter without DS. I was looking for a book to explain DS to younger children for my son's daycare, as some of the kids were starting to ask questions. This is the first book that I read aimed at children, and I paged through it, and quickly replaced it on the shelf and left the bookstore discouraged. The sister in this book feels that she has the worst brother until almost the last page, when she decides she has the best brother. The book doesn't do a good job of explaining how she came to this conclusion. Luckily, I found much better books ("We'll Paint the Octopus Red", and "Hi, I'm Ben . . .I've Got a Secret") which are much more positive in tone throughout the books. In "We'll Paint the Octopus Red", for example, the typical sister systematically comes to the conclusion that she will be able to do everything with her brother with DS that she had planned to do before it was discovered that he has DS by going through each activity one by one. That conclusion takes half of the book's pages to develop. Unfortunately, "The Best Worst Brother" doesn't really take much time developing the sibling's conclusion that her brother is really great. It is important, though, to let the siblings of children with disablities express their negative feelings on the subject to their parents, which this book does.

The Best Worst Brother is an engaging picturebook about an older sister struggling to get along with her three-year-old brother with Down syndrome. Her brother can't talk yet, so she and her parents try to teach him sign language to help him communicate. She is frustrated that her brother isn't as cheerful or as easy to please as he was when he was a baby, while at the same time he isn't grown up enough to talk or play with her. But an exciting visit to the school's Open House day shows that Isaac really is learning and growing up - one day at a time - and that he really is her "Best Worst Brother". A brief section of questions and answers about sign language rounds out this excellent book especially meant to be shared for young children with family members or friends who have Down syndrome.

The Best Worst Brother is an engaging picturebook about an older sister struggling to get along with her three-year-old brother with Down syndrome. Her brother can't talk yet, so she and her parents try to teach him sign language to help him communicate. She is frustrated that her brother isn't as cheerful or as easy to please as he was when he was a baby, while at the same time he isn't grown up enough to talk or play with her. But an exciting visit to the school's Open House day shows that Isaac really is learning and growing up - one day at a time - and that he really is her "Best Worst Brother". A brief section of questions and answers about sign language rounds out this excellent book especially meant to be shared for young children with family members or friends who have Down syndrome.

I have 3 boys the youngest having Down Syndrome. I contemplated buying this book because of the title. Bought it anyways - only to return it - because it was at no way a good message for the brothers nor was I impressed. I think the arthur needs to explain what exactly she was trying to write about. The only thing I got out of it was the girl realized she could learn sign language and then teach it to her little Down's brother and that would be something she would have done for him. Well, you could have wrote a lot better book to get that point across.
Don't purchase, there are many other great children books out there:)