arts: book review
Setting out on the road to work
Two books in a series about employment, one looking at family contributions and one on deciding what job you would like to do, are reviewed by members of LDN Connect
A Family at Work Sheila Hollins, Annie Brine and Gary Butler illustrated by Mike Nicholson
Books Beyond Words, 65pp, £10.00 paperback, £4.95 ebook
Choosing My First Job Roger Banks, Barry Carpenter and Diviyha Ramalingham Illustrated by Lucy Bergonzi
Books Beyond Words, 70pp, £10.00 paperback, £4.95 ebook
Having been a little sceptical at first about A Family at Work, we sat down with the book and found it really useful.
This book explores a family who are all working, and tells us about the work and different jobs they all do. We learned from it that when you work together you work better and that support from friends and family is important to succeed at work.
The family work very hard and take great pride in their work, which makes them very happy. We really liked the story about mum who is in a wheelchair and works in the theatre – we thought this was very inspiring.
It is not only a book of pictures to aid people with learning disabilities but also a good reference for parents and teachers guiding them on how to support individuals with special needs.
Our view is that the stories presented in this book are easy to relate to personal situations and can definitely inspire us.
Each person interpreted this book differently, which we really liked.
Overall, this book is an excellent tool when working with young people, setting goals and developing understanding of how to gain interests and translate them to employment. We talked about it as a group but also had some members do this 1:1 which worked well.
Starting out
We then reviewed Choosing My First Job, another book in the same series. When reviewing this book, we found that it caused lots of interest among all of us, and we liked its format.
We also thought it would be a good tool when looking for a job, and could help somebody gain confidence to start looking for employment and new work opportunities though having a conversation.
It is a good source of information for anybody who is lacking confidence, especially people with disabilities, for whom finding employment or even starting to look for it comes with many challenges and barriers.
The book is made with pictures with no words. The pictures are in colour, which we liked a lot. It tells us different stories about young people who are about to make choices over what they would like to do in their future work.
We liked the story about the young man who did not like any choices given to him at school. His tutor took her time to learn about him and about his passion, and helped him to find his future dream job which made him happy.
For most of us, paid employment is an important aspect of having a meaningful life, but a lack of confidence is a real issue and this book makes it look easy. Its positive content promoted that confidence as we went through the story and thought about what this could mean for us. We talked about the fact that the stories would not take away all the challenges but using the story to talk about the issues positively was a good way to talk about our own futures.
We would recommend this book……
In our next issue, LDN Connect will review two more books in this series, A Good Day’s Work and Glory Wants a Job. LDN Connect: https://www.wspld.org.uk/find-support/ldn-connect/
Beyond Words: https://booksbeyondwords.co.uk/
LDN Connect is an activity group from the Westminster Society for People with Learning Disabilities
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