"What You Need to Know about Motivation and Teaching Games: An in-depth analysis" is essential for anyone working with learners with social delays, including learners with Autism. This book dedicates significant attention to learner motivation, the ability of teachers to establish learner motivation, and, most importantly, the ability of teachers to identify whether their learners are interested. This book describes the philosophical underpinnings of various methods for teaching learners to enjoy playing games, and does so in a way that creates thoughtful, creative teachers. Further, this book provides scripts for teaching 12 specific games. For each game, the author describes: why the game is valuable, prerequisites, a basic instructional protocol, finer points, variations, and data. An emphasis is placed, throughout this book, on teacher responsiveness to student performance. Teachers will learn how to help their students actually enjoy playing games.
"Steve's book presents a valuable analysis of play and social play, and why they should be a significant part of an intervention program for children with autism. His analysis and excellent examples also correspond nicely with the social play areas of the Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program."
- Mark Sundberg, Ph.D. BCBA-D
"As a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and a mother of a 12-year-old son with autism, I found this book to be a very useful guide to help parents and professionals lean how to most effectively teach children with autism to play games. The step-by-step breakdown of how to teach 12 common games is excellent and the data sheets provided are superb! I highly recommend this book to parents and professionals working to help children with autism learn to play and, most importantly, enjoy games!"
-Mary Lynch Barbera, RN, MSN, BCBA