RETA Stories
With over 25 years of experience in the field of early childhood education, Wendy believes it is important to always honour and respect each child.
Wendy has more than 25 years of early childhood experience and has been a Fellow of the Register of Educational Therapists, Asia (RETA), since 2020. She shares that RETA provides excellent support avenues for resources such as conferences, publications, teaching materials, current affairs, and marketing for clients.
Wendy has a slew of Special Commendation Awards under her belt and worked with the NIEC (ITE) campus for nearly a decade. She is currently, a Centre Manager and Chief Educational Therapist at ‘Imagine If’. She is responsible for planning, implementing and fine-tuning eaxh child’s behaviour, social, motor, communication and suitable academic curriculum objectives with her inclusive cohort, some of whom have been diagnosed with developmental delays and disorders such as autism, global developmental delay, dyspraxia and intellectual disability.
When asked what made her decide to embark her journey in the SpLD field, Wendy shared that her first encounter with children who were labelled ‘special needs’ was when she joined the Early Childhood field. A boy diagnosed with autism in her class managed to eventually recognise her and started to respond to her appropriately. The sense of achievement became her motivation to work with neurodiverse children. Since then, she has always reached out to neurodiverse children/youths/adults be it as a teacher in the early childhood field or as a lecturer in the Institute of higher learning.
After a health scare, she decided to work full time as an Educational Therapist so she could dedicate her time and effort directly to the children in her care.
She highlights that it is important to always honour and respect each child. Do not shortchange them by undermining their abilities. Don’t overamplify the difficulties and stop them from even starting. Respect and honour them by believing that they can do it when time and the right concepts are applied.
Wendy also feels that more awareness needs to be created about neurodiverse children by helping more educators and parents to understand them and allow them to blossom and grow in a safe and respectful environment.
Her words of wisdom,
Believe in yourself and the neurodiverse children. Allow them to be in an environment that encourages them to be more resilient and self-aware. Let your and their natural intelligence be uncovered rather than smothered because of their needs!