Special Education Teacher Makes Excellent Author!
It’s hard for me, Kristi Lindsay, to believe that I have worked in education and education publishing for over fifteen years. 
After being state certified in two secondary areas, English and history, I also received my elementary and ESL certifications. I taught two and a half years in a multicultural and economically diverse school district in Houston, Texas. I used ESL teaching strategies daily in my second grade class. After teaching second grade one year in Round Rock ISD, I entered the educational publishing world.
Prior to working with PCI, I worked for another international publishing company, editing and writing elementary spelling and reading texts. At PCI I have had the privilege of writing a plethora of teacher resources, activities, small readers, binders, board games, and software.
Despite all of the projects I’ve worked on, I am known as the “Basic Writer” at PCI. One of my greatest writing endeavors is the Basic Series, which includes Basic Reading, Basic Grammar, Basic Vocabulary, and Basic Math. These fourteen binders address the basic and essential skills students need to master in reading, language arts, and math. Other series developed from these “Basics”. The writing of the entire Basic Series was no small task, and took many years, but I am proud of each Basic for the following reasons:
- Basic Grammar’s activities incorporate the multitude of teaching strategies I used to explain and exemplify confusing and challenging English grammar skills to my ESL students. I also found these skills to be beneficial for struggling readers and writers.
- Basic Reading addresses ten reading skills through over 500 fiction and nonfiction stories that I painstakingly wrote at challengingly low reading levels. It was not easy to come up with so many different story topics!
- Basic Vocabulary’s activities address and clarify many of the confusing skills, such as homonyms and multiple-meaning words, which made comprehending English difficult for my ESL students.
- Basic Math was the most fun to write because I included many student-centered hands-on activities and small group work I used in my own teaching to make these abstract skills tangible and applicable to ESL and struggling readers.
I used my experience with multicultural, multilevel, and multilingual students to write these binders, and I am proud of their success. I feel this comprehensive series definitely covers the basics!
