A worthy program for solving children’s complex behavioral problems.
An occupational therapist offers a series of strategies for improving students’ functional behaviors.
“It’s impossible to effectively provide therapy, teach, or parent a student who is kicking you,” writes Pagano in his slim, interactive nonfiction debut. In the pages of his book, he looks at the challenges facing teachers, therapists, and parents who are dealing with children who throw tantrums, hit, bite, or simply refuse to pay attention. The author provides practical methods grouped under the structure of FAB: Functionally Alert Behavior strategies, designed to center children and ground them in their surroundings and in immediate, achievable tasks. “Predictable rules and procedures set a safe, reliable structure that enhances self-control,” Pagano notes. Drawing on his decades of experience working with kids, the author lays out a series of approaches based on things like sensory modulation or “pressure touch” strategies. These strategies emphasize building strong kinesthetic skills to boost visual perception and common abilities. The book includes interactive forms for use by both kids and their therapists as well as ample illustrations, from children’s drawings to uncredited photographs of the author interacting with students. The key innovation here is the implementation of what Pagano refers to as “physical self-regulation strategies,” which provide “active sensory-motor” tactics that can be fitted into the students’ daily routines in order to improve their day-to-day functional behaviors. Throughout the book, the specific procedural advice being offered is clearly stated, deftly detailed, and uniformly optimistic in tone. Parents, teachers, and caregivers will find a great deal of food for thought in these pages when it comes to positive reinforcement, mindfulness, and physical massaging as a way to focus children and help them gain the self-control that will avoid or restrain the acting-out behaviors that can make teaching them so challenging. The volume’s combination of practical and interactive material will make it exceptionally useful to any adults facing the problems that unruly kids can present.
A worthy program for solving children’s complex behavioral problems.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73282-190-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Pagano FAB Strategies, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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