Practical Mathematics provides a set of simple, hands-on strategies and tools for teaching key mathematics concepts to children with an autism spectrum disorder and other developmental delays. With an emphasis on the importance of incorporating a child’s special interest into learning Adkins and Larkey strive to make maths fun for all children on the spectrum. Topics covered include colours, shapes, categories, numerals, sequencing, addition and subtraction and using money, and the book includes worksheets and activities for incorporating mathematics into daily living skills.

We have 5 copies to give away to anyone interested in writing an online or offline review.

If you’re interested add a comment to this post saying why you want to review this book.

We will get in touch.

John Killick demonstrates some of the playfulness techniques showcased in his new book, Playfulness and Dementia: A Practice Guide in the video below.

Professor Dawn Brooker, Director of the Association for Dementia Studies, University of Worcester says:

“This book tickled my fancy. Just as many lonely hearts advertisements specify a GSOH as their top priority in a soulmate, I would specify the same requirement for those providing support and care to me and my family. This is not to trivialise the experience of living with dementia, but rather a recognition that laughter can help us through the most difficult places. This book is full of ways to connect people through fun. There is nothing disrespectful or silly about the words in this book. It is full of compassion and honesty. It will supply you with a springboard to joy.”

Watch Playfulness and Dementia in action:

In the final Part of our interview with Dennis McCarthy, author of the new book A Manual of Dynamic Play Therapy, he shares some cases from his own practice in which his approach, Dynamic Play Therapy, was successful in facilitating positive changes in children with emotional and behavioural difficulties.

How should this book be used?

A Manual of Dynamic Play Therapy should be used as carte blanche permission to parents, educators and especially psychotherapists working with children to trust play. I hope the book will let them know why this is so if they don’t know this, and encourage those who already understand play’s necessity to feel affirmed in what they do, and to develop methods that emerge out of the overlap of their play and that of the children they work with. I hope readers will become less afraid of rocking the boat of authority that urges us to make the child talk in adult terms about what the adult world deems important to them. Rather than having children be obedient patients, I want to encourage us to attempt in our work to foster true self-possession, knowing how very hard it is to achieve. I urge us all to fight the tendency to negate emotion, to negate aggression, to negate anything and everything that pulsates with life and therefore stirs things up. How incredibly conservative the profession of play therapy has become, at least in the U.S.! We must free it from the constraints that have hobbled it. I hope this book affirms the centrality of play and reminds all of us how very powerful a vehicle for growth and change it can be.

The book can be used as a manual as the title implies. Having begun practicing play therapy with absolutely no guidelines, I hope the guidelines suggested in the book will help those just setting forth or those struggling to find their way forward. These methods and materials have proved highly successful, not only in my own practice but in that of many of the therapists I have trained and supervised over the years. In a sense it is the manual I never had.

Can you share some examples of successful application from your own experience?

I have a few recent cases to share. They fall under two headings; the suppressed child and the dysregulated child.

Case 1: The suppressed child – Charles.

In the category of the suppressed child, I want to share the brief work done with a ten-year-old boy I will call Charles. I have seen Charles three times thus far. Charles was adopted at birth by two depressed parents. The adoptive father had a history of physical abuse in his own childhood. His father has been in treatment with me for the past year. Part of his work has been coming to understand the needs and behavior of his children in a new and healthier light. When I first met him he would fly into rages at them regularly and then withdraw into himself. His rages were those of a cornered animal and he was responding to his children in self-defense.

After he had been coming for some time and doing much better regulating his emotions, his son asked to come with him to therapy. In that meeting they talked about his dad’s anger, fought playfully with some foam bats I have and then made a world in the sand, each using one side of the box. What I noticed in the son’s sand world was how flat and empty it was. There was literally no life in it, whereas his father’s world, though not terribly imaginative, had numerous animals and people. In fact, his son Charles had a flat affect and seemed repressed rather than depressed. Was this due to the atmosphere at home? It made sense that with two depressed parents, one of whom could be quite rageful, he would subvert his own natural aggression along with his vitality.

Some months later Charles asked to come alone to see me. He came ostensibly to talk about his father. I think he had been fascinated by the sand, as well as the potential for expressing anger and aggression with me. This time his sand world was much more complex. He spent a long time making a huge mountain and hollowing out the inside. This was quite a feat and it took great patience and skill on his part. I am actually not quite sure how he managed it. Once the hollowed-out mountain was done, he made a very small opening in it with a very defined pathway leading to it. He placed trees around it and a few animals. The world was described as “the mountain palace of a people who were now somewhere else”. There was an air of mystery to the allusion to the people and the remnants of their life there. The mountain felt and looked like a pregnant belly. Despite being empty, it felt full. Charles also spent time venting his anger at both his father and his teacher at school who was very strict.

In my most recent session Charles’ sand world depicted a huge open-air arena. People lined the tops of the walls of it watching knights battling below. There was a king watching too, and he was being protected by soldiers. Charles made this world with the same intense deliberation as his previous one. But the mountain had opened up and become a place of battle and was also filled with people. At his session’s end his father noted how the world seemed like the opposite of his previous one. His scene didn’t fall apart but rather it unfolded. Charles was coming to life before my very eyes, birthing a new way. The diminishment of his father’s rage, plus his having an opportunity to articulate the inner stasis and evolve it, has begun to make him a happier and more assertive child at home and in school.

Case 2: The dysregulated child – Sam.

Over the past two months I have accepted into my practice several extremely dysregulated boys. After saying yes to the parents, I came home and asked my wife if I was crazy go have done so. Why at my age would I agree to see four boys who, according to their parents, were extremely out of control? In fact these boys have been a joy to work with and loudly affirm the material in the book.

A four year old I will call Sam was brought to see me a month or so ago due to an increasing tendency to “get stuck” in situations and have prolonged tantrums when his parents tried to shift him from what he was doing. This “getting stuck” manifested itself in almost any transition. He would bite and lash out in these moments with increasing intensity.

Sam had a very long and traumatic birth that necessitated having his shoulders broken to emerge. His mother said in our intake that Sam was born angry. How else might a child respond to such an entrance into this world? I think Sam might have some neurological or sensory integration issues and he will have an evaluation by a pediatric neurologist in the coming weeks. But in our sessions several interesting things have happened. First, Sam has created an ongoing and evolving story in the sandbox. In his first session his sand story showed one side (his) which he referred to as “the bad side” and which was filled with monsters and dragons. The other side, which was the good side, had one small monster on it. I was put in charge of this side. Nothing happened other than setting the stage, so to speak. The bulk of his play happened elsewhere in the space. In his second scene, the sides were a bit more balanced and they were both “bad”. By the third scene the bad side comprised the whole box and the focus of the story was less about “badness” than about how they were living. A pool was made and a tower built and one monster that was made up of flames kept diving into the pool from atop the tower. Then the monsters all withdrew underground. In the end all were covered up with sand and the box looked almost empty. This withdrawal into the sand’s depths felt significant.

Most of Sam’s sessions have involved him playing very intensely with a variety of materials with me mirroring him and also provoking him in subtle ways, urging him to shift. For example, in his first session, he attempted to paint and each time he dipped the brush into the paints he got stuck in the satisfying sensation of the brush in the gooey paint. He wanted to actually use the paints, yet the sensate experience threatened to win out. My job was to affirm his play and attempt to dislodge him at the same time. In our last session he spent time banging on some drums and chimes I have with a large stick. He’d grit his teeth with each bang and he seemed to be attempting to tolerate the intensity that he himself was creating. He had a hard time stopping the banging even though it was annoying him. I tricked him into periodically experimenting with soft bangs, which created a whole different sound and sensation. After doing this a few times with great satisfaction, he laughed and leapt into my arms and gave me a huge hug. He seemed thrilled to have been tricked into a new experience. It was after this that he went back to the sandbox and had his monsters withdraw into the sand.

Illustration from 'A Manual of Dynamic Play Therapy' - a child's monster drawing.

This burial of the monsters felt like an establishment of filter. The monsters were now declared “safe” by Sam. Safe from whom?, one might ask, as one would not think monsters in need of protection. I think the answer is safe from themselves. If the monsters are in fact Sam’s own impulses and emotions in their dysregulated form, which for him they were in that moment, then the sand was indeed acting as a regulator for these. Amazing!

After my first meeting with Sam I had urged his parents to see his behavior in a different light – as happening due to dysregulation an organic level, rather than simply him acting out or being “bad”. I also urged them to spend “floor time” with him in which they could mirror his play and really join him in it. They admitted that this never happened and they began to connect with him on this level.

After several weeks his parents have reported a much happier, “softer” child at home who is getting stuck much less. When he does get stuck he lets his parents help him get unstuck. I trust this will continue to improve with some steps backward perhaps. I only just now realized the association with his “getting stuck” in his play and his having been stuck in the birthing process. The synchronicity of the two feels important. I think both his parents and my spending time with him on his energetic level using his play language has been the key.

I have worked with many hundreds of Sams. Once the intensity of their own energy becomes more modulated in their play they become more regulated in their overall functioning. The mix of mirroring and simultaneously offering a new way can be a pivotal experience for many children.

Case 3: The dysregulated child – The Twins.

At the same time that I said yes to Sam’s parents I also agreed to see two twin boys whose mother was battling a virulent form of breast cancer. I am quite sure she sought me out as an ally for her sons and her husband in case she died. Even prior to her diagnosis the boys had been very dysregulated. Had they seen a pediatric neurologist they would have been diagnosed with ADHD. The volume of their voices was incredibly loud, their bodies seemed to tremble with energy and one of the two reacted strongly to loud noises. The family had recently moved from an urban setting to a rural one. The boys had begun public school and on their first day they had bitten both the principal and their teacher.

When I began to work with these boys they had just begun sleeping in their own beds for the first time. I recommended this even before I met with the boys. The “family bed” can be a boiling pot for the psyche, and in these boys’ case I think it was part of what was charging them up. Given their mother’s illness, it was especially important that there be more boundaries set. It is hard to know how much this action alone accounted for the major shift in their behavior that has occurred since.

The boys came separately and on separate days and both entered my office with a level of intensity that was impressive. Initially they were in almost constant motion, yet they were also very drawn to the sandbox. The box became the center of our work, literally. Each boy kept an ongoing storyline in it from session to session. At first their play seemed to fall apart quite easily. In fact it was difficult for things to stay together at all, not because they intended this but simply because they were so dysregulated. But things quickly coalesced. One of the boy’s worlds were comprised of monsters fighting knights and he definitely identified with the knights. His brother’s worlds depicted battles between a group of samurai at war with a large family of dragons. He was aligned with the dragons and I was assigned the role of samurai.

In their first two visits they were in motion the entire time, with me attempting to join them in their moving. I didn’t always mirror their actual moves since these boys were able to do things I am no longer able to, such as cartwheels and elaborate falls. But I was in sync with them energetically and they sensed this. They loved that I was aligned with them in their wildness, even as I attempted to lure them into play that might better regulate them. By our third visit they were both much calmer, much less loud vocally. All of the energy was now in the sandbox and the play that ensued therein. This play was very intense but because it involved other creatures acting out their dysregulation, they themselves were not.

Initially when the boys came to see me I could hear them coming from a few blocks away. They began to shout my name out long before they reached the building where my office is. It was both charming and alarming. But now, six weeks later, they arrive and sit with their mother reading in my waiting room. They leap up when I open the door but they don’t seem ready to explode.

I don’t know what life has in store for these two boys. Their mother is struggling with her cancer just as their father is struggling to better mirror his sons and not label them as “bad”. In their own beds with new allies in the quest for healthy self-control, they seem to be making great headway. Their teacher tells me they are now a joy to have in class and that they are remarkably empathic towards their peers. I assume these traits were always there but were trumped by the intensity of their dysregulation.

I think all of us are waiting to be found, waiting to be reached by another. This has been my experience as both patient and therapist. Each child and adult I have ever worked with seemed to be hoping I could lure them out of where they were stuck, lure them into finding a new way of being, even as they may have fought me to stay stuck. The paradox of this is part of what makes the work dynamic. The longing for change and the resistance to it are potentially the catalyst needed to bring about change, if we are able to tolerate and use this. Again, paradox is the essence of metamorphosis.

Copyright © Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2012.

In Part 2 of our interview with Dennis McCarthy, author of the new book A Manual of Dynamic Play Therapy, he shares the ideas behind the book; his own personal philosophy of care; and how using materials like sand and clay in play therapy can help children explore their healthy – and very necessary – creative and destructive impulses.

Can you tell us about your new book and its underlying thesis?

The new book describes the evolution of my thinking about play therapy and what makes it a dynamic process and is perhaps as much a manifesto as it is manual. I am concerned about the dearth of play in schools, in homes and in child psychotherapy settings, as its power and necessity become ever clearer to me. Long ago I stopped needing to affirm the efficacy of play in my own thinking. I knew it worked. This allowed me the freedom to consider what is happening when a child’s shattered life is made whole, or when a dysregulated child is suddenly able to live within their own skin with more ease. I have seen a continuum in the use of play as therapy that spans all childhood problems.

The fundamental issue seems to me to help children not be afraid of themselves - i.e. the emotions, impulses and energy that they must reconcile to be in relationship and to function in this world. This aliveness or what I refer to as “our bigness” becomes all the more difficult to tolerate and regulate when there is trauma, neurological or learning issues or a lack of parental nurturance.

What I observe happening, and what I also provoke in children’s play, is a “falling apart” and reorganization of the basic structure of their play that I think is the act of metamorphosis itself. This falling apart happens in the service of the ego and is thus curative rather than destructive. What I am referring to is not de-compensation but rebirth. The book looks at the paradox in play that allows for and even encourages this falling apart just as it attempts to solidify how the child feels. The idea of paradox is the central tenet of the book. Embracing paradox as necessary for real change to occur is both frustrating and liberating. The book is about this paradoxical process.

I watch children build worlds in the sand and then I see them implode. Perhaps not right away. But eventually the structure collapses and then re-forms in a new more and functional way. Today a very impulsive child, after smashing a lump of clay over and over again, made a very complex world in the sand filled with all the things he was afraid of. He stood before it triumphantly. Then just before he left he made it all fall apart, and quickly put the lid on the sandbox. “Let’s see what the next kid thinks of that!” he proclaimed as he left. This young child is struggling to regulate himself and to learn how to be relational with other children. He wants desperately to connect but his own impulses get in the way. And the only way forward for him is this process of making and unmaking, which expresses and provokes the changes in his own psychic structure.

How does the book reflect your general philosophy about care?

Some lines come to mind from a catalogue for the traveling exhibit of “The Hundred Languages of Children” based on the Reggio Project in Reggio Emiglia in Italy, which teaches preschoolers in an arts based approach. The original title of the exhibit was “The Eye, If it Leaps Over the Wall”, based on the idea that the child’s mind “begins to see, to reason and to renew itself to the extent that it is able to leap over the wall…the wall of the banal, the rhetorical, of conformity, the wall of inertia and official reticence.” I believe in this wholeheartedly!

I think play and play therapy allow children’s eyes and hearts and souls to “leap over the wall”. This leap can be profoundly healing. Often the wall gets knocked down, literally, as the child struggles to imagine more freely, to reorganize their defenses and their psychic structure to allow more movement, more articulation of self. This idea of leaping is at the heart of play and brings to mind the familiar quote from Plato in which he likens play to the need for all creatures to leap, to defy but not escape the laws of gravity, to test the leeway of life and learn how to land resiliently. The imagination, often the vehicle of this leap, is also able to express and transform otherwise unspeakable and intolerable emotions.

What are some common obstacles in understanding and applying dynamic play therapy to practice? How can your book help?

There are several obstacles. With rare exceptions, the academic and professional world doesn’t support a dynamic approach to play therapy (or often the use of play in therapy at all). There is an ever-greater thrust to pathologize the child and the family and this is often where the therapist/therapy stops: diagnosis leads to stasis. This needn’t be so. We can and should have an understanding of what is going on in the child and in their life, but unless we then engage the child in real play, we have not accomplished much. Children need to be allowed to be children and speak their language not ours.

By and large I find parents very supportive of my approach even though their children sometimes come home and announce: “I chopped dad’s head off with a guillotine today!” In fact most parents welcome this release, in part because it often alleviates rather quickly the symptoms that brought the child to therapy. I think most parents, once they have admitted that something is wrong, can readily relate to the need to draw monsters, the need to express negative aggressivity. They too were once children with great passions roiling inside. They too still feel at odds with what lives in them that has not yet been freed.

Secondly, the therapist must do his or her own therapeutic work. This is a must if we are to engage a child in falling apart play, or play that allows for and even encourages negative discharge. We don’t need to have resolved all of our own issues but we need to be at least engaged in the process of grappling with them. If we are unwilling to explore and interact with what lives in us that we don’t know, we should not invite the child to delve into themselves either, largely because they will be alone in the process. They need us with them as they negotiate the forces of life that are stymied in them. Our own inner exploration can be very synchronistic with the work that happens in the play space. Children seem to riff on what we are digging up in ourselves, especially in the realm of charged images. Yet they use these images for themselves.

It also helps to have an understanding of the centrality of aggression in the forming of relationships, which the book explores, and to not mistake aggression in the service of the ego and health with real violence. I think the use of negative discharge in play must happen with levity and within the context of a relationship.

It helps to have mentors, even if they are no longer alive. Winnicott is a great proponent of aggression as are Lorenz, Whitmont, Reich and Lowen. These psychological innovators have made great contributions to our understanding of what is entailed in becoming a person.

Why was it important to include a chapter on play materials that facilitate healthy aggression?

The materials we use are in many ways the vehicles of change, the vehicles of play. They not only allow the child to better express and articulate themselves but they also provide a buffer from the raw intensity of the feelings being expressed. I use clay, sand, blocks, paper and movement as the main materials in aggressive play. It is my knowing that these materials work and can work safely, and my understanding of how they work that helps the child feel that I am in control so they can let go. I become the ground wire of the experience until they establish their own. I hold the space, so to speak, while they play with shedding their dysfunctional defense system, replacing it with a more functional one that is less rigid or less porous, depending on the child.

The materials used in the process have a great potency. They become more than just clay or sand. In the charged process of play therapy they are raw materials of the self. I am still surprised by this after all these years. A lump of clay is just a lump of clay until the child, within the context of the therapeutic relationship and with the need to do so, can make the clay become a substance that expresses and transforms the self. How amazing! What awe that inspires! The techniques I use are less important than the materials. I am fond of some of these techniques since they are not only fun, but work. But when I simply sit with a child by a lump of clay they may do amazing things with it regardless of what I advise, out of inner necessity and the creative urge that exists in all of us. The materials, the relationship, the need all combine as a catalyst.

That said there are certain materials that by their very nature allow for disorganization and a re-organization. Sand, clay and blocks in particular allow for this. In my first meeting with them, I often introduce children to the various materials and how they might use them to express aggression. I urge them to consider what feels best to them, what satisfies their bodies most. Children always have a clear preference.

Part 3: Dynamic Play Therapy in Action »

Copyright © Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2012.

Jessica Kingsley took a few minutes between meetings to talk about why we attend this major international event, and to highlight some of the things we’ve been talking about.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Craig is the author of a breathtaking book of poems, Embracing the Sky: Poems beyond Disability. Here, he reflects on his determination to achieve his intellectual goals in the face of difficult physical challenges presented by his autism and cerebral palsy.

My journey began in 2001 as a nervous freshman, wondering if I could tolerate the increased stress and rigor of college classes. I only took two classes per semester since my cerebral palsy and movement disorder make fast typing difficult. Add in my sensitivities to sound and light and my tendency to act more autistic under stress and I knew that I had great challenges ahead of me.

Craig Romkema accompanied by Marliss Van Der Zwaag, Coordinator of Services for Students With Disabilities at Dordt College.

Four things helped open doors of understanding towards me: first, the meeting Marliss (pictured above) and my mother held with the new professors explaining my behaviors and my ways of working in the classroom; second, a video that described my communication system to the professors and my new classmates; third, my aides who provided me with physical and emotional support so that I could relax and tap out my contributions to classroom discussions; and fourth, my book, Embracing The Sky, which allowed everyone to understand my life and to hear my voice. My book is still sold in the Dordt College bookstore.

And so we trudged on through snow and ice and rain and welcome sunshine, sometimes my mother or other assistants, through ten years of exams that took the class one hour but took my slower hand more often three or four, through class after class of puzzled but friendly students and gradually relaxing professors, through hours of listening to textbooks on tape or read by helpers, and of composing hopefully thought-provoking papers, through years of the blessed delight of learning! We became tired and out-of-sorts from time to time, but my brother and sisters had passed me by and I was determined to complete what I had begun. My parents would find me immersed in our college annual, studying the faces of the graduates. I wondered what feelings I would experience crossing that stage.

I believe my sister’s photograph (above) reveals them all. I will be forever grateful to those who allowed me to take my place alongside my intellectual peers, reveling in the ferment of ideas. I hope the next step of my journey will include more enlightened souls who will enable me to add my contribution to the meeting of this world’s needs. I am not a statistic or a category, or even just a client. By God’s grace, I am.

Below is a beautiful and fitting poem from Embracing The Sky which Craig wrote for his mother, Barb Romkema, upon his graduation from High School in 2000.

Graduation

Great friend, listener,
Divider of my shroud of fear,
To you the words are given
That no one else knows are there,
For in perfect relaxation they flow like a river of escape,
Of connection, of joy.
Long you battled my defenses,
The gobbledygook of a frightened mind,
Reassuring me that the words could proceed unimpeded
Through practice and trust.
Eventually you calmed my spirit enough
That my mind could direct
My hand,
And the words,
Triumphant,
Blaze their message
From ignominious disability
To honored academia.

This I celebrate today–
Tassel hanging, robe swishing,
Marching with measured steps into the ceremony.
With honors
They tell the world,
While onlookers silently wonder,
But you and I know the journey we have traveled
Together.

So great friend, listener,
Divider of my shroud of fear,
I carry this diploma for all the years
You sought me.
Now my words can comfort you.
Listen.

A few comments from Barb on his graduation from Dordt:

I have been privileged to sometimes walk alongside Craig and sometimes cheer him from a distance, but always to try to honor his desire for a full, inclusive life. Thankfully, others have supported us in our pursuit of that dream. We need their encouragement to make a new way for Craig and others like him.

Craig wants to keep writing, to be able to make a living using the words he loves so well.

We hope the world will create new possibilities for him.

Many thanks to Craig and Barb for sharing their thoughts on this very happy and well-deserved occasion! Click below for more info about Embracing the Sky.

Copyright © Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2011.

JKP author Winnie Dunn spoke twice at the conference and copies of her book, Living Sensationally, flew off the shelves – we couldn’t replenish them fast enough! Attendees were also drawn to our stand by the ever popular All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome and All Dogs have ADHD, both by Kathy Hoopmann.

Thank you very much to everyone who stopped by our stand and grabbed a catalog!

View our online catalogs here

Copyright © Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2011.

Click to browse the JKP Complete Catalogue – Autumn/Winter 2010-2011

Information on How to Order