By Sara Finegan
Invariably, when Jack used our classroom library, he headed to my extensive selection of non-fiction books. Bin after bin of books about animals, habitats, insects, birds, weather, space and other topics of interest were the focus of Jack’s interest. If I guided him in the opposite direction, toward the leveled fiction books, he’d zoom right back to non-fiction like a magnet to a pole.
Jack had very specific interests, and they were: reptiles, reptiles, and reptiles. He could, and often did, recite lists of facts about snakes, lizards and turtles like some automated encyclopedia. It was an intense and mesmerizing experience listening to him talk, and it left one feeling quite bowled over by information.
Clearly, Jack could read and understand what the text was saying. Equally clearly, however, he wasn’t quite as skilled in what he did with the information as he initially appeared.
For one thing, Jack had no concept of relative importance of the myriad of facts he read.
When Jack read about the bearded dragon, he didn’t identify which were the really key facts and which were interesting details. All of the facts he read were both important and interesting. There was no distinction in Jack’s mind and oral retelling between “the bearded dragon’s natural habitat is the dry, rocky desert areas of Australia” and “they can sometimes be found perched on fence posts in inhabitated areas.” Both are absolutely fascinating, and therefore must be…important.
For about a day, I worked with Jack on “what’s really important and what’s less important?.” Besides giving me a big fat headache, it made Jack very confused. “More” and “less” are tough concepts, especially when it comes to importance.
Then I tried, for about half an hour in a guided reading lesson, the concepts of “things we need to know” vs. “fun facts to know and tell”. As you can imagine, that went over like a sequined jumpsuit in a tuxedo department. Jack thought all of the facts were fun to know and tell, and could not grasp that actually, to most people, some things fall into the category of trivia whereas others are quite obviously essential.
One of the side benefits of teaching readers with autism is that I am constantly being made aware of my own prejudices and biases, how often I push my own opinions into the box labeled “fact,” and how really instinctive it is for me to try to impose my world view on others. Every time I work with a child on the spectrum I am brought face to face with the unnerving reminder to not get stuck in my own head, and am much the better for it!
It was pretty clear to me by the time my second session with Jack ended that the traditional ways of teaching about main idea and supporting evidence were not going to work and that once again I had to wrap my head around finding a new approach.
This is where I should write about how that very evening, while meditating before a peaceful fire with a glass of wine, I was struck by inspiration. In reality, it was more like six weeks later, while sorting socks and listening to Barry Manilow singing “Trying to Get the Feeling,” I stubbed my toe on something sharp under the bed, which turned out to be the corner of my copy of The Art of Teaching Reading, by Lucy Calkins.
I dragged it out, intending to throw it against the wall, when I noticed a post-it marking one of the pages. Apparently, one night months before, I’d been reading and decided that something on page 323 was important enough to mark before discarding the book on the floor, where it gradually got shoved all the way to my husband’s side of the bed.
Page 323 was all about reading centers, and what I found significant enough to warrant discarding all of the socks for 10 minutes was the table in the middle, which listed different ways to organize centers. Specifically, the text read “we may organize centers around a kind of book….around a genre of text…around an umbrella topic…a reading goal….”
Of course. Umbrellas. That’s what Jack needed! A visual. The umbrella statement is the main idea, and underneath it are the supporting details. I had completely forgotten about this method of showing kids how paragraphs are organized.
The next morning, I got together with Jack at a table, and showed him a graphic organizer with umbrellas. “We’re going to write the big idea inside the umbrella,” I told him, “and all of the details about that big idea under it.”
Jack looked at the pictures of umbrellas and the spaces I’d marked to fill in. There was no expression on his face.
Undaunted, I got us started. We had a book about geckos and I asked him to open it to the first page. After Jack read it, I asked him to think about what was the umbrella idea. Jack looked at the picture of the umbrella on his graphic organizer. He was silent. Nothing.
After a few prompts, he pointed to a sentence about the origin of the name “Gecko”.
“Hmmmm,” I said. “How did you decide that this is the big idea?”
He shrugged. All of a sudden, my very vocal Jack was not talking at all. He was shutting down quickly. I had no idea why or what to do about this, so I let him go back to independent reading and moved to another guided reading group.
It was later that day, during P.E., that Jack finally let me see what had confused and troubled him.
“Umbrellas don’t have anything under them, except a person,” he said.
“Yes, that’s true,” I answered.
“They keep rain off. They keep things from being there.”
Well, duh. Of course this approach wasn’t going to make any sense to Jack. The visual of an umbrella as the overarching idea was absolutely wrong. To a concrete thinker like Jack, umbrellas exist to create an empty space where rain should be. They are protection from things, not holders of them.
I regrouped.
I really needed more time to piece through exactly what we need to know about a paragraph. And in doing some more thinking, I realized that before we even think about a main idea sentence/phrase, we identify the topic.
What Jack needed, before he could articulate a main idea, was to identify the topic of a paragraph and the facts related to it. How to help him get to that was easier than working the concept of main idea.
What I came up with, eventually, was the concept of a plate and food. This seemed to work best for Jack, who was almost entirely a visual learner, and whose favorite time of day was lunch. I got the idea because I noticed that when he unpacked the lunch his mom sent him, he started by pulling out a paper plate. He then unwrapped each item: veggies, sandwich, cookies … and put them on the plate in clockwise order starting at the top.
The next time I met with Jack, I had a set of 5 paper plates. I put the first one in front of Jack and told him we would not be using it to eat with, but that it would help us work on understanding how the paragraphs in the book about geckos were organized.
At the end of half an hour, Jack had a handle on it. Each paragraph was a plate, and the plate had a name.
The first plate was called “Where They Live,” and on the top of the plate he’d taken crayons and drawn circles, each one with a different location caption.
The second plate was called “What They Eat” and included crude pictures of a worm, a roach, and a cricket.
Now Jack knew that each paragraph is a plate/topic, and that each topic has a lot of facts connected to it.
For the next several weeks, Jack worked on naming the plate/topic and food/facts in different paragraphs he was reading, and we would talk about how he decided what to name the plates and what “food” he put on them. Gradually, he began to talk more and more about the organization of facts and, although he wasn’t yet thinking in terms of broad vs. specific, he was getting closer.