Parents best teachers of special needs kids, programme's Hong Kong founder says
Having taught her autistic son, Louis, to read and write after professionals had failed, Yolanda Wong developed a programme to help other parents and named it after him
Gaining their children admitted to prestigious schools, even kindergartens, is the prime goal of many parents, who commonly say nowadays that they do not want to see their children "fail at the starting line".
One parent, however, took an unusual path. Through stamina and a strong Christian faith, Yolanda Wong, a Hong Kong emigrant to Perth, Australia, devised her own curriculum for teaching special-needs children that families worldwide have embraced since the late 1990s.
Soon after moving to Perth in 1992 with her husband and two children, Wong discovered that her son Louis was autistic. He was sent to a special school, where he was assessed time and again as lacking the ability for verbal communication and learning words.
When Louis was 10, in 1995, she hired an autism expert to design a curriculum for Louis with hopes of developing his literacy. When the expert could not find a solution, she decided to teach Louis herself, beginning with the alphabet, some easy words and how to count. She started to collect various kinds of pictures to create matching cards for him. Some days she spent more than 10 hours preparing teaching materials.
"With his low attention span, it was very difficult to get him to sit still for 10 to 15 minutes. I had to frequently change the puzzles, colour-matching materials on the table to draw his attention. To encourage him, I also often praised him, saying things such as 'you are wonderful' and 'good boy'," she recalls. "I wouldn't regret it even if he still couldn't write his name until the age of 20. At least I know I would have done my best."
After a month's training, Louis could sit still for 30 to 45 minutes. But it took months before he could write his own name after practising hundreds of times.
