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Staar-Alt Helper
Work Smarter - Not Harder

 

About Us

I am Cindy Lovelace. I have worked with special students and adults for 30 years. I spent 17 years as a Life Skills teacher with grades 4-6th at Ennis ISD. I worked with all the Life Skills teachers as the TAKS/STAAR-Alt Coordinator.

Since retirement, I’ve created materials and training to give teachers the help they need to improve their teaching skills in the classroom. Our goal is for special education teachers know how to teach more effectively and how to document their good work.

My husband does the production for all our products and travels with me to all training. STAAR-Alt Helper is truly a family owned business and we love doing it. Let us know how we can help you to better serve your students.

 

Our Products

The SpEd Helper Aligned is a set of lesson plans and materials based on the prerequisite skills needed to meet the state standards. This saves teachers time and helps them know what to teach and how to teach.

Communication Necklaces are a helpful way to communicate with nonverbal students and to teach them functional language. We make versions for Teachers, Students, Nurses, Counselors and an at home version for caregivers and chidren.

Our Pictorial Dictionary with Symbolstix has over 600 words with symbols, parts of speech and simple definitions. It can be used with any regular education vocabulary assignment to help our students in inclusion classes. Many districts have used it with their Bilingual students to increase their English language learning.

Research Based

All lessons are based on the concept of Hands-on Minds-on Learning. This concept says that people do not learn anything with out without involving their senses. People need to see, hear, taste, smell and/or touch. The more senses involved, the more learning happens. We learn through our sensory experiences.

This idea is not a new one. The concept of Cognitive Constructivism by Jean Piaget stated that children learn through what they experience. Each thing learned either added to existing knowlege or modified existing knowlege to accommodate the new information. Piaget believed that motivation had to come from within and that people needed to learn to be motivated.

Piaget's theory of learning has led to other theories such as Kolb's Experiential Learning and Montesori Learning.

The activities in the SpEd Helper follow these theories by giving students sensory experiences and repetitive lessons. Most teachers call these methods Hands-on Learning.

 

What other people say

If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.

Ignacio "Nacho" Estrada

Never do anything for a student that he can do for himself. If you do you will make him an educational cripple.

Howard Hendric

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

Everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

Albert Einstein