Wednesday, October 2, 2002
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Wednesday, October 2, 2002 |
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Teacher's motivation helps special-needs children
After years of working with children with limited language skills, a veteran Fayette County teacher has developed a set of books that will help students improve their verbal abilities. Beth Respess, a speech therapist at East Fayette Elementary, is the author of a set of five books called "Autism and PDD (Pervasive Developmental Disorder): Basic Questions," which has been published by Linguisystems, a publishing company that produces materials for speech therapists and other special education teachers. When working with special needs children, Respess says a common goal among educators is to teach students how to answer basic "wh" questions who, where, when, what and why. In trying to select books to use in her own classroom, she often found that most were too verbally and visually complicated for children with limited language skills. This motivated her to set out and develop a set of reading materials that would not only address basic questions but also would be fun for the students to use. "I wanted to create a book that these children would enjoy, whatever the topic. I think the complexity of many of the children's books out there today is the reason many of these students do not care for books," said Respess. Respess' book is one of simplicity in both wording and illustrations, with a central character called "Buddy Bear," and it has an interactive component each book has reusable stickers in different shapes that the child correctly places on the page after it is read. According to Respess, this aspect is what catches the interest of the child so that the therapist has the student's attention for the words on the page. After some repetition, the child can answer the "wh" questions on his or her own. This set of books is the first Respess has published. The 26-year veteran speech therapist began working on the project about five years ago and spent much of that time experimenting with various ways of producing the reusable stickers before discovering that she could make them out of plastic sheets. In the middle of working on the books, she lost her son Jonathan and the project was put on hold. Eventually it would be one of her students who would encourage her to pick up the books again and finish them. "After we lost our son I did not have much heart for the books. When I started working with a student who has autism, I was inspired to complete them because he and some other students enjoyed reading them and seemed to benefit from them," she said. In January of this year, she decided to submit her books to Linguisystems for consideration. Within a week she heard back from the company that they were interested in publishing them. She was assigned an editor and together they worked to finalize the wording and illustrations. Now Respess' set of books is featured in the Linguisystems catalog for teachers across the nation to purchase and use in their classrooms. "I am amazed by how close the finished product is to my original books, and conversely, how they took the raw material that I sent and turned it into real books," said Respess. "One of the neatest things was receiving my Fall Linguisystems catalog in my mailbox at school and being in it." While teachers will be the primary users of Respess' books, she says parents can use them as well, especially if their student's teacher has already introduced them. The books can be order through the Linguisystems catalog.
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