ABOUT US

Marie Dunleavy

As a parent of a differently abled child I struggled to find suitable material to progress my child’s reading. A learning experience where my son had fun prolonged the time he was prepared to apply himself to his work. With my wonderful and very dedicated team I am proud to have produced over thirty children’s books and lots of supplementary resources, with many more to come in the future. No effort is spared to produce the very best resources of the highest quality as our special children deserve nothing less. POPS Resources offers a fun filled book and games approach aimed at maximising your child’s exposure to the targeted vocabulary. My son loves success and thrives on praise. Opportunities for success are an integral component of these resources.

Kate Hayward

I have been working with children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder for the last five years. I am currently a Principal Teacher in a unit for children with ASD. I love my job, it is challenging, rewarding and of course the children make it all worthwhile. As a teacher working with children with additional support needs I understand the need for specialised resources, which have been designed with our children in mind. I have a passion for making and developing resources and I feel privileged to have been involved in the development of the POPS Reading Programme.

Zoe Benson

I have been a teacher in Edinburgh for 11 years and held the role of Support for Learning teacher, in two large city schools, for 6 years. I am currently pursuing accreditation for Chartered Teacher status. I have enhanced my practise in the teaching of reading, through training in Reading Recovery as well as undertaking courses in Dyslexia, Reading Difficulties and Autistic Spectrum Disorder. I am delighted to use my knowledge and skills to help produce a fun and motivating resource that encapsulates Goodman’s (1990) holistic view of reading; “To be efficient readers, that is to make sense of print, readers must use phonics information along with meaning and grammar cues.”

 

Janice Kelly

My name is Janice Kelly and I have been a Speech Therapist for over 20 years. I work in a special school and also am involved in communication groups for children with disabilities. I work with children with a wide range of disabilities including ASD, speech and language impairment and Down syndrome. I have enjoyed working on the Pops books where I have sought to use reading to promote a child’s language development. I am interested in the overlap between language and literacy and believe POPS Resources have used this overlap well to help special children.

Alexa PopeI

I am an acting Principal Teacher in a mainstream primary. I have had children with special needs in my class for the last 10 years and very much enjoy the opportunity to work with the children and their families to ensure they achieve their potential. I believe every child in my class has individual needs and I work hard to ensure they all have the opportunities they need to progress to the best of their abilities. I first became involved with Pops when I worked with Daniel, the son of the author of the Pops books. Daniel was in my class for 2 years and I developed many resources to support his learning style and needs. I was delighted to have the opportunity to make these resources available to other teachers and parents as they are time consuming to make. I was especially interested in finding a way to help Daniel with his phonic development and the phonics sets and slider game available through Pops are much like those original ones used in my classroom to support special children. I also enjoy the challenge of developing the books with the other teachers and speech therapists, as they all bring such a different viewpoint to the process.