Susan Ellis

www.exceptionalmag.com

July-August 2011

CONTENTS

Extraordinary Profiles 56

Cover Story— Nicko Williamson–London’s Green Entrepreneur Achieves Success with Climatecars

63

Susan Ellis—From Challenge Comes Knowledge and Triumph

Inspiration 68

Doors of Opportunity Usually Swing Open on the Hinges of Adversity

70

Stacy Hawkins Adams in Profile

72

Turning Challenges into Opportunities

73

Summer Self-Care

The Lighter Side 75

Water, Water, Everywhere

79

Profile Resources

80

Writers and Contributors

Cover photo by Grey Hutton Photography

Focus intently upon your life's passion.

Don't lose sight of Your Goal.

As a parent, you want your child to grow up happy and healthy. Susan Ellis was no different, but what was different about her son Ryan was that before he turned three years of age, she noticed that he was developmentally delayed.

By three and a half years of age, Ryan was officially diagnosed with autism.

Ellis knew she had an uphill battle, but she was willing to endure. She made a commitment to herself and to Ryan that she would help him live the best life possible.

From challenges often come victories, and from her life’s challenges, Ellis has developed a series of products that are improving her son’s life, as well as the lives of many other children.

She and Ryan’s therapist, Marnie Danielson, developed a series of programs called "The TV Teacher" aimed at helping kids with special needs learn to write. The programs have become so effective that

Susan Ellis From Challenge Comes Knowledge and Triumph

Extraordinary Profiles

one of them is being considered for use with normal kindergarten children as well.

Ellis, a dedicated and determined mother has turned her challenge and her son’s challenge into an amazing success story.

Monica: Talk a little bit about your experience with Ryan and how that inspired you to start the TV Teacher program. How has it helped parents with kids who are suffering from autism?

Susan: We saw differences, and he was always delayed, I guess I should say. And he was never really quite reaching some of the milestones even at, 12 months and 16 months. But at about 18 months he was definitely delayed and had very bad temper tantrums and he wasn't responding to his name or becoming engaged or listening. And we started going through speech therapy and occupational therapy. This was probably about the time -- a few years before Autism Speaks and Jenny McCarthy and others brought a little more media attention to autism. It wasn't that prevalent in discussions with people what autism was about. A number of teachers who knew and therapists who knew wouldn't tell me. I really had no idea why my child was behaving this way, but I knew something was wrong.

We finally had the official diagnosis when Ryan was about three and a half years old. At that point we were able to research different things that we could do to help him such as a glutenfree, casein-free diet, which made a huge impact on him. He ended up being allergic to a lot of the foods we were giving him, typical foods that children eat. Trying some other biomedical interventions like B-12 and different supplements and vitamins

made tremendous breakthroughs with him. He began talking within weeks.

With a child who really had no clue about the world around him, after we began removing milk and gluten and wheat from his diet, you could just see the haze beginning to lift.

It was interesting. So we've been very fortunate that a lot of the interventions that we've done with Ryan have been very successful. That's been a saving grace for us. And through that we started to learn. We did ADA therapy, which is very intense one-on-one therapy.

That helped me to understand how to teach him. He's very visual, and so through the next couple years, I worked very intensely with Ryan, bringing him up to grade level. So this is basically how the TV Teacher was born -- through all of these breakthroughs that Ryan was having.

He got through all those therapies up to grade level. He was about to enter kindergarten, but he still could not write. He couldn't write his name.

He wouldn't write a shape or a letter.

But the interesting thing was that he could actually read and spell. So he understood letters and he knew how to use them, but he just couldn't motor-plan them.

He had been in therapy for almost two years, inside and outside the school system, working on this one skill. I had purchased every program I possibly could imagine that I thought would help him, motivate him, and nothing was working. And I watched him one morning watching TV. He was imitating a dance step that he saw on TV, and the light bulb went on in my head. I said, "Wow. If he could imitate that, why couldn't he imitate writing? If I put writing on TV, would that be enough to motivate him?"

64 | Exceptional People Magazine | July-August 2011

I called his therapist, Marnie and I said, "I think I know what he needs.

Would you just give me a few minutes of your time," and graciously she did. We went to my basement with my camcorder camera, and we started on the letter C. She would say rhythmic chants that she had always said in the clinic, but he had been so distracted that he never really caught on.

His therapist looked at me, and she said, "Sue, I don't get this. I do this all the time. What are you trying to accomplish here?" I said, "I just know how his brain works. I know how he thinks. I really think he needs the visual aspect of it." "This is boring though. Let's make it jazzy. Let me throw in some props, make it more exciting." And we did, C is for cat; C is for candle and so forth. I said, "Just be as goofy as you can."

And I videotaped her, and then we moved it to the chalkboard. We put it down on paper, and it ended up being about a three-minute video. Later that afternoon I showed it to him and he sat there completely glued and watched it and said, "Do it again." I played it for him again. I put a marker in his hand, and I said, "Are you ready, little buddy?" And instead of taking that marker and throwing it across the room, as he had been doing for two years, he actually held it. We started saying the chant, "Up and around, letter C, up and around, letter C." And he just got it. We made this multi-sensory approach. That was the miracle that finally made that connection that he needed. Now I'm hearing that from children, therapists and teachers all over the country.

I called her up immediately and said, "Okay. We've got one letter down.

We've got 25 more to go. When are you coming back?" So we worked really diligently all summer long. She

Extraordinary Profiles

with some of my friend's children. They were having incredible breakthroughs too. Within minutes they were correcting their letters. So I said, "We're going to go professional." So we made a professional DVD, The Uppercase Alphabet Beats. And we didn't even know at the time whether we would sell 50 of them. But we had such an amazing response, and teachers and parents and therapists just loved it and asked us to do more. So we came out with the lower case a year later. And I mean these productions are really two-hour long productions, so they're quite intense and they take quite some time to produce.

And then we came up with a prewriting program called Strokes, Shapes and Scenes that works on just making a simplified line down or a mid-line cross to making shapes and making pictures from shapes. And this is really working on creativity that so many children with autism and

was gracious enough to donate free therapy time, trying to create this tool for him.

And you don't find that many individuals who can give up their time on the weekends to do this.

And as we started going through a couple letters, she started giving it to some of her other clients, and they had tremendous success as well.

Ryan’s therapist said, "I think we've got something here.

These people are finding success. Ryan is finding success." And I even tried this July-August 2011 | Exceptional People Magazine | 65

Extraordinary Profiles

Down syndrome and ADD -- many of them lack that ability to think abstractly.

Just video-modeling that on the TV and allowing them to say that this is okay and this is what we mean by changing some designs has really made great breakthroughs, as well in allowing them to be a little bit more palatable in their thinking. We recently came up with Number Beats, which teaches children to count, skip-counting and writing numbers.

Monica: What are some of the usual signs that a child may have autism?

Susan: Most likely you're going to get a lack of language processing in speaking. A lot of times you'll see that when you call their name, they won't respond. They may be in a room or even in a preschool environment in a class, but they're playing alone. They're not necessarily engaging and wanting to engage with other children.

Many children with autism have sensory integration. Sight-wise, hearing, touching, feeling are many times either very high or very low for them.

A lot of children with autism may have problems with loud sounds.

What you and I may not consider to be loud, like flushing the toilet -- that sound would drive my son to the ground.

So those are certainly key things to consider, that there might be a bunch of little things on this spectrum.

Those are some key points that may be a "red flag," to watch for.

Monica: When you began TV Teacher, how did you bring people together, the teachers and the specialists to help you create this amazing program?

Susan: Great question. It has been primarily, Ryan’s therapist, Marnie and me. We have a great collaboration because she has over 15 years experience with occupational therapy inside the school system and in her private clinic, working with children with various diagnoses. I, of course, had been living 24/7 with autism with language delay. I have another son with Auditory Processing Disorder.

So it's been really us putting this together and working from the magic that we first created in that basement video. It's the same type of design, only now more professional.

We created workbooks. We sat down with a group of kindergarten teachers who had already been using our program and asked, "What do you want in a workbook," and just gaining ideas from them. We certainly like to ask questions and we always try to incorporate the feedback that we get from various therapists and teachers and parents.

Monica: Where do you see the TV Teacher program in the future?

Susan: I think our next program will be focused on cursive writing.

Marnie is such a capable and qualified occupational Therapist (OT) and has a presence that kids just love.

And I think we're going to come up with stories, for example, going to the dentist, how to play with friends or not to bully, and just different things from a social aspect.

Monica: That would certainly open up many more doors for you.

Susan: Around the country school systems are beginning to learn about our program. They will purchase our programs and put it in special needs pre-K and kindergarten classrooms, as well as regular kindergarten pro-

66 | Exceptional People Magazine | July-August 2011

grams. We are in various retail stores so that people who home school can go into a school-based retail store and purchase our product. We are available online. We've made the program cost very reasonable. We didn't want it to be out of reach for any person or to ruin the budget of a school system by any means. It’s very affordable for teachers and parents of children with special needs. There are so many things that we spend money on that insurance doesn't cover. We wanted it to be very easy and a no-brainer price for parents to use.

Monica: You have found your purpose in life, and it's wonderful that you're not only helping your child, but you are helping thousands of other children as well. So what do you find most rewarding about your life’s passion?

Susan: Exactly that, I'm helping children that I've never met. When I get an email from a parent in Montana or a city where I've never been, just the fact that what we have developed has touched a family so much and has reduced frustration for a child -- I mean that just makes our day. It never gets old, and we share with our team whenever we receive emails.

We say, "We helped another one." To have a child go from being so frustrated while performing a simple task to understanding how to motor-plan and providing a feeling of accomplishment, it's amazing.

I have learned to have patience more than I ever thought I would. I look at a lot of things differently now. I have become much more accepting of differences, a lot more relaxed about differences than I ever have been, especially when I was in the corporate world. ♦