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Everyone knows that when you become a teacher, you need patience, perseverance, and passionto really excel in your job. After all, being in a room full of children is not exactly the easiest job in the world. Teachers never really get the credit the deserve, especially those who do more than what their job requires to extend a helping hand to their students.
Speech-language pathologist Amy Maplethorpe is an example of an extraordinary instructor who went out of her way to help others in need. To ensure the comfort of her students with sensory development problems, the teacher cuts tennis balls in half and glues them to chairs. Find out more about her amazing actions below.
Teacher Cuts Tennis Balls and Glues Them to Chairs to Help Her Students
Amy Maplethorpe is an elementary school instructor based in Round Lake, Illinois. She works hard every day to provide her students the necessary materials for learning and sees to it that her curriculum focuses on life lessons, appropriate behavior, and the right ways to interact with their peers. It may be a difficult job especially when the students start acting up, but Maplethorpe could not ask for more.
The hardworking teacher was looking for more ways to make learning a wonderful experience for her students. So she devised an incredibly useful product: a tennis ball chair. Tennis ball chairs are not exactly new in a classroom or office setting, many have been attaching tennis balls to chair legs in order to prevent scratches on the floor for years.
For Maplethorpe’s invention, the teacher cuts tennis balls in half to provide students with an alternative texture. She came up with the idea after seeing a similar design on Pinterest and realized that it could be beneficial to students experiencing sensory processing disorder. Among those under the category are children with Down syndrome and those falling under the autism spectrum disorder.
A photo of Maplethorpe and her invention quickly went viral shortly after it was posted online, garnering over 90,000 shares and counting. The school decided to post instructions on how to replicate the tennis ball chair to help other students in need.
