Mission Statement

By Sara (readers1)  |  2009/08/15 10:57 Posted in General  |  Comments (4)

By Sara Fineganjigsaw_green_10

When I began teaching in Southern California several years ago, I assumed that the fact that an entire department of my school district was devoted to autism meant that I would be able to get information on best practices and the latest research to support my students in learning.  Accordingly, I would invite people from the Autism Support Department to my classroom to observe individual students in order to help me figure out the best ways to help them access academic learning.

They came and watched and gave me odd suggestions such as “well, you could use a checklist…” or “maybe you could reward him with toy time when he finishes,” neither of which really addressed my desire to help my students with autism read better.   It took several months of frustrating interactions between me and two Department employees before one of them finally informed me, “Sara, we handle behavior.  Not learning.  The academic stuff is not what we do.”

I was on my own.

From that point on, I’ve been on a mission to discover and try out whatever instructional strategies I can find to support and shape the intellectual work of my students with autism.   There hasn’t been a lot out there.  We have research up the wazoo on autism, but most of it is wrapped around behaviors and causes, not how kids learn and what helps them learn. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that parents and teachers are on our own here, and that just as parents have been pioneers in locating therapies and supports for their children, so must we teachers with autism in the classroom dig our own trails and share everything we learn. The mind of a child with autism is the mind of a child is the mind of a learner, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to wait around for our school districts to find funding to add cognitive issues to traditional autism support.

My purpose in creating this blog is to found a forum where I can share what I learn and what I’m trying on, and parents, teachers, and other people who love learners with autism and are committed to showing them how to learn can come and get ideas and share what works for them.

Readers with autism experience difficulty with tasks such as making inferences about characters and situations in text, making predictions about what will happen next, negotiating figurative language such as metaphor and simile, questioning for meaning, and a myriad of other strategies we take for granted when we navigate through a novel or short story.

Research has shown that most readers with autism do not connect parts of text.  In other words, a child who is reading a story may not recognize that what happened in the last paragraph is related to what is happening in this paragraph, and thus will not be able to keep track of the plot at all.

Assisting a child in developing, strengthening and regularly using the strategies and understandings needed to fully comprehend text is the job of parents, teacher, and other support providers such as occupational and speech therapists, tutors, and teacher aides.   

Our job is enormous, but we must not be daunted by the size of the task; instead, we must focus on and customize individual interventions and lessons that bridge the gap between a child’s deficits and strengths.

During my teaching career, I’ve developed some interventions and instructional strategies that seem to work well with many readers with autism, particularly those with hyperlexia.  I have also used many ideas given to me by my colleagues and parents of my students, who are my best and most wondrous partners. Support providers at every level are encouraged to try them, modify or expand them, and customize them to fit the needs of their own readers with autism.  Your comments, suggestions, and questions are always welcome.

Our goal is to provide Help for struggling readers on the autism spectrum.bookshelf

Humor and the child with autism

By Sara (readers1)  |  2010/08/13 12:03 Posted in Expressive language  |  Comments (0)

By Richard Finegan

Anyone who spends much time living or working with children with autism will have experienced their quirky senses of humor.  Others may be surprised to discover that a child with a flat affect and monotonous speaking voice can be intentionally funny.  And appreciate humor for humor’s sake.

An example:

Summer school, an art project–students are stenciling each letter of their first names on separate squares of paper, then using colored pencils to ornament each letter.  Stars, squiggles, stripes, polka dots, a beach scene–whatever strikes their fancy.  The squares will be placed on the wall showing each kid’s personalized signature.

Midway through this project, which took part of three days, the teacher had an idea: “You know, we can take the letters and make them look like an animal, like A for Alligator.” Then he holds up the letter from his own name that he happens to be working on at the moment…an N.

One, two, three seconds elapse.

“…or Nalligator!” he says. We all laugh, sitting around the table together.

Alejandro (not his real name) sits quietly for perhaps 30 seconds, then smiles and says in a voice louder than normal:

“Nunafish!“  Students, staff, we all crack up.  But Alejandro is on a roll…

“Nooster,” he adds, still grinning, and finally…

“Nabbit!”

Enough said?

* * * * *

Textual clues to emotion will help with inflection

By Sara (readers1)  |  2010/07/26 20:52 Posted in Expressive reading, Making Inferences  |  Comments (0)

By Richard Finegan

Just a couple of observations about two high school students I have worked with recently:

One writes in short, concrete sentences, almost always in the present tense, even when he’s journaling about what he did yesterday.  Is verb tense, particularly when writing, a common problem for kids on the spectrum?

Both of these students (and one is much nearer the Asperger’s end of the spectrum than the other) are capable of reading aloud with inflection if they KNOW what the emotion of the speaker is supposed to be. If there are textual clues that the speaker is angry or happy, they know how that sounds. I find this interesting since one of my students speaks in a monotone generally and reads routinely in a very soft tone.

Yet if the text says something like:

John was angry. “Give me my backpack!” he demanded–both will add appropriate, louder, inflection when reading John’s words.

To get a student with autism to read with inflection, especially the younger ones, perhaps we need to TELL them what the emotion of the speaker is.  They usually won’t infer this from the situation, even though most of us will.  But they know how an angry person sounds if they know he’s angry.  Or a happy person.  Or a sad person.

The more they recognize the different tones of voice, the easier it will be to infer emotions in daily communication.  Perhaps.

Inference Cuing: What is the most likely reason for that?

By Sara (readers1)  |  2010/04/17 21:45 Posted in Making Inferences  |  Comments (1)

By Richard Finegan

It has frequently been observed that children on the autism spectrum  tend to be concrete and literal thinkers who have difficulty with abstract concepts like inferring a character’s unstated motive.  When reading fiction, the concrete thinkers will focus narrowly on the minute physical details and often miss the “big picture.”

Fernando’s red jacket flapped in the wind as he raced on his new bicycle down Maple Street.  Ignoring the stop sign at the end of the block, Fernando ran straight into the side of a passing city bus.  When he woke up he heard a siren and realized he was in the back of an ambulance.

The child with autism should have no difficulty telling you that Fernando’s jacket was red, and his bike was new.  He probably would be able to report that Fernando ran into a bus.

Yet some may not recognize that the person in the ambulance is Fernando, because Fernando’s name is not stated in the last sentence, only the pronoun “he” is used (an example of anaphora).  Children with autism frequently will not connect one sentence to the next, even within paragraphs.

While it may seem to us both obvious and critically important for the reader to recognize that Fernando is injured, the child with autism may make no such connections without coaching.  They do not always think about the ramifications of coats flapping in the wind, bicycles speeding, and stop signs ignored.  The visual image of a child’s body striking the side of a moving bus does not automatically come to them, or necessarily suggest to them an ambulance ride to the hospital, or worse.

Anaphoric cuing (about which there are several articles on this blog) teaches the child to stop when he gets to anaphora and ask himself who or what, or where or when or why questions to focus his attention on the meaning of what he is reading by identifying the referent words.  The reader needs to think about who is waking up in an ambulance, and why.  Was Fernando napping or was he knocked unconscious?

Inferring motive

A character’s motives may be similarly difficult for the child with autism to recognize, even when they seem clear to most readers.

Bob’ s favorite green Boston Celtics hat was missing from his locker!  He looked up and down the hallway and spotted George wearing a green hat!  Bob ran down the hall, shoved George against the wall, and grabbed the hat off his head.  As Bob was walking away, he noticed that the green hat he was holding said Dallas Mavericks.

The child with autism might know that Celtic hats are green, might know Bob’s was missing, might know the hat George was wearing was green, and yet may be stumped by the question:  Why did Bob shove George and take his hat? Since the text does not explicitly say that Bob suspected George of taking his hat, the reader with autism might not make this seemingly obvious inference.

How to infer state of mind, emotion, or motive from a character’s actions is something that must be taught patiently to young readers with autism.  Often the teacher or aide must have to learn how to recognize themselves when they are inferring so they can guide the student to a similar inference.

What is most likely?

When a character is described as frowning and speaking loudly, we may infer “anger” without even being aware we made an inference.

Julia waited on the front porch of Elizabeth’s house for 15 minutes.  When Elizabeth finally came outside, Julia frowned and asked loudly, “Can we go now?”

The concrete thinker, if asked, might surprise us with the number of other possible (if implausible) explanations for speaking loudly while frowning.  They can always come up with fanciful scenarios (“maybe a caterpillar crawled in her ear“) which have no connection whatsoever to the text.  They may need to be prompted to focus their thinking on what is most common and most likely under the circumstances of the story.

  • What are the most common reasons why someone would do that?
  • What is the most likely reason this character is doing that, considering what just happened to her?

Keeping track of details is a strength

When instructing a whole classroom of students, most of which do not have autism, on a long piece of fiction one may discover an advantage that many readers with autism have: they can often keep track of a surprising number of minor characters and minute details, even if they have difficulty connecting them.

A high school student with autism, having studied an abridged version of Romeo and Juliet for several weeks in class, was watching the Zefferelli film and laughed to himself when Romeo’s servant, Balthazar, passes a monk on a donkey while on his way to Mantua to tell Romeo of Juliet’s apparent death. “Friar John” the student said.  Friar John was not named in the version of the play studied.  The name was mentioned once in class weeks before.

I have also observed (to my surprise) that some children with autism are as capable as other kids of learning the meaning of idioms such as “nose to the grindstone” or “sick as a dog” or “hold your horses.”  In fact, they may even recognize the humor in certain idioms, once they learn the meaning, that others more familiar with the terms may overlook.  Drawing an absurd picture to illustrate a witty idiom may be great fun for these children.

Asperger Syndrome rolled into new Autism Spectrum Disorder

By Sara (readers1)  |  2010/02/10 14:20 Posted in Autism spectrum  |  Comments (4)

By Richard Finegan

The new proposed DSM-V, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual that is the bible for mental health professionals, would eliminate Asperger’s syndrome (first added to DSM-IV in 1994) as a diagnosis separate from autism.  Those now diagnosed with Asperger’s will presumably fall into the milder end of a broadened “Autism Spectrum Disorder.”  Numerous articles about the proposed change are available, including this one from National Public Radio.

The new name for the category, autism spectrum disorder, includes autistic disorder (autism), Asperger’s disorder, childhood disintegrative disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified. 

For those like me curious about the actual wording of the new proposed section of the DSM-V (and I’ll admit I’m a wonk and want to see these things verbatim, not just interpreted for me by someone who thinks I can’t read well enough to understand it), here it is:  [Bold face and words in brackets I have added]

Autism Spectrum Disorder

Must meet criteria 1, 2, and 3:

 1.  Clinically significant, persistent deficits in social communication and interactions, as manifest by all of the following: 

a.  Marked deficits in nonverbal and verbal communication used for social interaction:

b.  Lack of social reciprocity; [and]

c.  Failure to develop and maintain peer relationships appropriate to developmental level  [and]

2.  Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least TWO of the following: 

a.  Stereotyped motor or verbal behaviors, or unusual sensory behaviors 

b.  Excessive adherence to routines and ritualized patterns of behavior

c.  Restricted, fixated interests [and]

3.  Symptoms must be present in early childhood (but may not become fully manifest until social demands exceed limited capacities)

http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=94

What were they thinking? Teach vocabulary!

By Sara (readers1)  |  2010/02/06 09:00 Posted in Expressive language  |  Comments (0)

By Sara Finegan

There was a time in recent memory when teachers were actively discouraged from teaching vocabulary disconnected from academic subject areas.  Word walls were always subject specific.  Wordlists were always dictated by the text being studied. 

You never taught the words “subtle” or “reckless” or “arrogance” until the particular text the child was reading required it.  As a consequence, word groups, antonyms and synonyms, were learned haphazardly and shallowly, if at all.

The rationale for this was mysterious.  Subject and text specific vocabulary always was and always will be taught as needed.  What children needed was a deeper, richer, broader vocabulary and teachers were discouraged from providing it directly.

Children with autism often (and with hyperlexia, always) recognize  and fluently read words most of their peers stumble over.  But this does not translate into understanding those words.

Those of us attempting to help struggling readers on the spectrum to comprehend what they read in narrative, in text, are limited by the breadth of the child’s working vocabulary.  Anything we can do to expand that working vocabulary pushes us closer to a grade-appropriate level of reading comprehension.

Both expressive and receptive language difficulties are made worse when the child has a limited bank of words with which they are familiar.  To help address this very issue, I use what I call “sorting cards” which I finds can be employed to integrate not only subject-area vocabulary but also word lists (adjectives, adverbs, active verbs) used for descriptive writing.

Recently, I’ve begun using my “smart board”…yes, in these difficult times, when I may be taking a pay cut, I still have cutting-edge touch-screen technology in my classroom, thanks to a bond issue.  But where was I? 

Oh yes…I use my Promethean smart board to let kids move words around on the board, grouping them into synonyms and antonyms.  In small groups they talk about them, match them, rearrange them, and use them while having fun at the same time.

Whatever we need to do to expand vocabulary is also promoting comprehension as well as expressive and receptive language.  Not just for our kids with autism but for all the children in our classrooms.

Hope for Haiti Telethon, Jan. 22; Need, today

By Sara (readers1)  |  2010/01/16 12:20 Posted in General  |  Comments (0)

It has nothing directly to do with reading or autism but everything to do with being a caring human being.

At 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, January 22, a voluntary collection of cable networks will simulcast the Hope for Haiti telethon to raise money for earthquake relief.

Actor George Clooney, Musician/singer Wyclef Jean (himself a Haitian) and CNN journalist Anderson Cooper will cohost the programming.  Scores of celebrities seem to be rearranging their schedules as we write this in order to appear at one of the three venues.

Laudable as this event will no doubt be, Friday is six days away.  People are in desperate need now, today.  We encourage our readers to find an organization you trust (examples: Doctors Without Borders, the American Red Cross, UNICEF) and give now.  Don’t wait.