Mission Statement

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

By Sara Finegan

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

Happy Fourth of July!

By readers1  |  2011/07/04 07:04 Posted in General  |  Comments (0)

Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor

Photo copyright Richard Finegan, Paraeducator Central

Converting text to speech: Kurzweil 3000

By readers1  |  2011/02/23 19:28 Posted in Technology  |  Comments (0)

By Richard Finegan

     Kurzweil 3000 is a word processing (text-to-speech) program with some neat features and real value for some students.

     The manufacturer, on its website, calls the 3000 a “comprehensive reading, writing and learning software solution for any struggling reader, including individuals with learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, attention deficit disorder or those who are English Language Learners.”

     I don’t know that I’d say any struggling reader, but I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks with two different students, and am reasonably impressed.

     Kurzweil will read aloud anything you can type into it or cut and paste from another document, in one of eight different voices.  I like “VW Kate.”  Even cooler, you can copy text from the internet (Firefox recommended for that).  For a kid who struggles with reading, this can be a real learning tool.  He can have Kurzweil read aloud to him the article he found but couldn’t quite understand.

     For students who struggle with spelling (and how many of the kids we work with don’t?) it has not only your typical Spell Check feature (called ABC, with a tiny icon on the bottom blue toolbar) but also a Word Prediction feature (another a tiny icon that looks like a crystal ball).  

     Word Prediction, while you are typing, will suggest (in a floating box) a number of words you might be trying to spell.  Biggest problem with it is that, once you’ve misspelled the word (how about “typiccal”) and hit the space bar, all those possible choices disappear and you hear VW Kate say “tip-pickle.”  You think that doesn’t sound quite right, glance at the Word Prediction box and it’s empty.  So you have to use the Spell Check anyway to see your error.

     Still, the fact that Kurzweil reads aloud what you have  just typed as soon as you hit the space bar gives you immediate feedback that you may have misspelled it.  And if you’ve garbled the word so badly that VW Kate can’t even attempt a pronunciation, “she” spells it letter by letter, a dead giveaway that your spelling is way wrong.

     You can start the read aloud from any point in the document, to listen and see if you typed what you meant to, or left out a word, or didn’t complete a thought.  If Kate doesn’t pause where you think she should, it probably means you left out a comma or a period.

I think the program will be most useful for revisions and final drafts of documents that were written without the special features, possibly on MSWord or even Notepad. 

     The reason I say that is I often find that a child who knows he can’t spell and tries to use spell check features in the beginning step of writing will get so bogged down, word-by-word, with the spelling that he loses the thought.  He produces, very slowly, a string of correctly-spelled words that make no sense.

     Kurzweil 3000 has many useful features, like choices of read mode and speed and four-colors of highlight, and other features like Bookmark, Column Notes, Note Snippets, and Word Lists which I haven’t had occasion yet to try out.  I don’t recommend using what seems to be a redundant “Spell” feature on the top red toolbar because it didn’t seem to work for me.

(Joint posted on www.paraeducatorcentral.com)

Paraeducator Central: Our New Blog

By readers1  |  2011/02/11 15:07 Posted in Paraeducators  |  Comments (0)

     All aboard!  We now host a new blog by, for, and about paraeducators:  Paraeducator Central.

     We only slowly came to recognize the amount of interest there has been on posts about topics relating to those non-teacher personnel who serve our special needs kids, whether we call them special education assistants, paraprofessionals, classroom aides, educational assistants, or paraeducators.

     We hope and believe that this new blog will serve a needed niche, where paraeducators can speak for and among themselves.  Take a look and let us hear from you.  http://paraeducatorcentral.com

Paraeducators need to speak for ourselves

By readers1  |  2011/01/12 10:11 Posted in Paraeducators  |  Comments (7)

By Richard Finegan

      There seems to be lots of interest on the web in information about paraeducators and our work with special needs kids. Plenty is written about us by teachers, administrators, union professionals or college professors who’ve never actually done our jobs. Not much out here is written by paraprofessionals ourselves. That is a shame.

Sara and Richard Finegan

      Some, even some of our coworkers, may have the impression that we are little more than day care workers in the public schools. Most of us have been asked by a general ed teacher to leave the classroom (and the kids we are there to help) to go run some menial errand. Many of us are not even consulted about or included in IEPs relating to the kids we work with, as if our observations or insights are of no consequence.

      If we are going to be taken seriously, as professionals, we need to support efforts to make our jobs more professional. Continuing education classes should be required for us, in my opinion. Certification by the state might be appropriate where that is not already done.

      But I’ve drifted from my point: We need to speak for ourselves. We need to assert ourselves as intelligent, articulate professionals capable of worthwhile contribution to the discussion of our own jobs and role in the special education system.

      With the expansion of full inclusion, where kids with special needs are distributed among the general ed population and not segregated in special classes, more of us than ever before will be working in general ed classrooms without the constant presence of a special ed teacher. Many of the general ed teachers will turn to us for guidance in dealing with issues relating to our kids. If you’ve worked as a one-on-one to an included child you know this to be true.

      We need to be prepared to step up to the plate. Don’t wait for the general ed teacher to identify problems to you; bring things to his or her attention. Suggest solutions or consultations with the special ed case manager. Be an advocate for your kids. Be an advocate for yourself as a knowledgeable coworker in the classroom, more than just a warm-bodied adult.

      We contribute to this acceptance of us as professionals when we stop letting the conversation, both in the schools and on the web, be ABOUT us and start being WITH us.

We need to speak for ourselves.

      So here is my invitation to all paraeducators with something to say to the world: contact me. I have no desire to be a lonely voice in the wilderness of the internet . I can see that appropriate posts get published and, more importantly, FOUND by search engines like Google, bing, Yahoo, AOL. Together we can be stronger.

     If there is enough interest in this, I am considering setting up a separate blog that can serve as a forum and sounding board for paraeducators. What do you think?

     I am cross-posting this on The Demanding Classroom and Readers With Autism. Each blog already contains earlier posts for and about us as paraeducators. You can look for the category “Paraeducators” on either blog to find my posts, which are mostly different on each site.

First…Then: A kindergartner with autism, Part II

By readers1  |  2010/10/20 18:50 Posted in Paraeducators  |  Comments (3)

By Richard Finegan

Experiencing some success with the rule cards I devised for Jacob, and taking further advantage of his desire and willingness to read, I took another step this week.

Jacob (not his real name) is a kindergartner with autism  who decodes well, better than most of his peers, but is easily distracted, especially by the knowledge that just across our small playground there are cars passing by– cars he’d rather watch than do just about anything else. I am his one-on-one paraeducator.

Except in the morning, when he is at his most attentive, it has been a nearly constant job to redirect him to whatever task is at hand, using the five “Jacob’s Rules.”  Usually I don’t have to read the rule aloud any longer, simply get his attention to it by placing it in front of him and perhaps prompting: “What should you be doing?”

But rules alone don’t help much with transitions, of which there are dozens in the day of a kindergartner; and when the kindergartner has a constant distraction just outside the window, something else was called for.

Both Jacob’s mom and his new speech therapist mentioned that he had some success in the past with a “First ___, Then ___” approach to get him to do something less desired before doing something desired.

My thought about how to utilize “First ___, Then ___”  in the classroom was not to reward every appropriate behavior but simply to get him to do things in sequence, to focus on what he should be doing now and then proceed to what he will be doing next, without walking to the window during every transition.   I am not helping him become a better student if I lead him by the hand to each new activity.

With the support of his classroom teacher and case manager, I got a small whiteboard, maybe 10×12 inches (about 25×30 cm) and used painter’s tape to divide it into four panels.  The left side I labeled “First” and the right side “Then.”  It looks like this…

Now I carry around my ring of Jacob’s Rules, the whiteboard, a dry erase marker, and a small square of felt cloth I use for an eraser.  I write the activities in sequence, always showing what he just finished, what he should be doing now, and what he’ll do next.

 He’s a kindergartner, after all, even if he decodes well, but I often have to tell him what it says.  Still, he loves to read, and will attend to any new entry on the board.   I let him hold the board in his lap so he can see what the current activity is and what the next one will be.

An added bonus:  Because Jacob is fully included with students that do not have special needs but read less well than he does, they are fascinated by his rules and his “First ___, Then ___” board.  They want to read them too! 

Even though all his classmates are learning to write their letters, and he lags well behind them, Jacob is held in high regard by the other students for his ability to read.  For a child with autism, it can only be a good thing when his peers early recognize him for his strengths.

Writing rules for a kindergartner with autism

By readers1  |  2010/10/13 18:35 Posted in Paraeducators  |  Comments (3)

By Richard Finegan

Just when I thought I knew what I was doing after years as a paraprofessional working one-on-one with children with autism, life teaches me a hard lesson:  it is a different world in kindergarten!

I mean, kindergartners are barely socialized!  And I’m not talking about the ones with autism.  They have to be taught how to walk in line, how to use crayons, how to sit in one spot.

I work with an included five-year-old who can already read at about a first grade level but rarely talks spontaneously.  He is stimulated to the point of fascination by moving vehicles and our classroom has a full view of the street.  He will stand up, turn his back on the teacher, peer out the windows (or walk to the door when the windows are blocked) and bounce stiffly in place while watching the cars.

For more than I week, I redirected him (over and over) back to his place at the checkered rug, where most instruction takes place.  Finally, I had an idea.

As I said, he reads, or at least decodes, well.  Things like “Animals need plants to grow” and “Think About It” which were titles in a science book we were looking at together.  He may have hyperlexia, but it is difficult at this point to assess how much he comprehends of what he reads.

I also have had the experience with more than one older child with autism that they tend to (dare I say) religiously follow rules, and are often upset by other students who disobey them.

So I decided to write some rules for Jacob (not his real name).

Jacob’s Rule 1:  In your square or in your chair.  Other kids were sent to their desks when they wouldn’t behave at the rug, so I did the same with Jacob.  He accepted this readily.

Jacob’s Rule 2:  Eyes on the teacher.  He would rarely watch the teacher or look at what she was demonstrating to the class.  I showed him the rule while turning him toward the teacher.

Jacob’s Rule 3:  Stay in line.  He doesn’t stray far from the line but rarely follows behind the person in front of him.

Jacob’s Rule 4:  Hands to yourself.  He has a friend he adores, a girl smaller than he is, who he loves to touch and hug.  Which is quite cute but…not conducive to what is considered appropriate classroom behavior.

Jacob’s Rule 5:  No watching the cars.  This one was a gamble.  Jacob’s car watching is less a choice and more a compulsion.  But I was hopeful that, once he accepted that there were rules in the classroom, we could stop the “stimming” by reminding him of the rule.  So far, I’ve had some success with this.

I printed each rule on a different colored square of paper, laminated them, and put them on a ring.  I carry the ring around most of the time and when I enforce a rule, I hold it in front of Jacob until he looks at it, then point to the words as I read them.  He will now read along with me and will almost always comply with no additional prompting. 

Granted, it is often as little as 30 seconds before he forgets and repeats the activity, but I am thrilled that a child with autism that young is responding to written rules.

Non-fiction matters, Part II

By readers1  |  2010/10/12 18:56 Posted in Non-fiction  |  Comments (1)

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.

Non-fiction matters, Part I

By readers1  |  2010/10/11 19:03 Posted in Non-fiction  |  Comments (0)

 By Sara Finegan

I have spent more time thinking about fiction than non-fiction when it comes to supporting readers with autism, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to make it a priority as the kids get older.

Most kids on the autism spectrum (but again, not all) tend to prefer non-fiction books and don’t exhibit as much difficulty making meaning of what the text tells them.   This is because the information in expository text is usually very literal and concrete, and doesn’t require any deep probing for concepts that are, by their very nature, alien to the kids.   

What we learn about rainforest animals in a science text  is straight-forward.  Information about where and how they live, what they eat, and who preys on them can be provided in pictures, diagrams, and simple, clear sentences.   Readers with autism can often read, assimilate, and categorize expository information very quickly and without support.

What we learn about friendship in The Secret Garden, on the other hand, isn’t something we can visualize, takes more than one sentence to describe, and  needs all kinds of words and examples, and the ability to carry ideas forward and stretch them back in the story.  This is hard for many kids in general education!

We must not neglect non-fiction reading with our readers with autism, however.  By the fourth grade, kids are going to need to be able to understand the concept of “main idea and supporting detail;” to identify them, to use them in organizing facts and concepts, and to write them.  If we ignore these essential skills, our readers with autism are going to be limited in what they can do with information they read about.

I re-discovered this foundational piece of expository text comprehension this year when I began to teach the BING, BANG, BONGO method of writing five-paragraph essays to a group of general and special ed students in the fifth grade.  Although at first it appeared that everyone was doing quite well using a planning template to formulate their body paragraphs, I realized after a couple of sessions that more than half the kids were not able to create a main idea sentence (BING sentence, BANG sentence, BONGO sentence) based on the three details they’d chosen for a topic.  As I listened and watched a little longer, I concluded that they weren’t even aware of the fact that all paragraphs have a main idea and supporting details and don’t identify them as they read, much less write.  We are now going back, in guided reading groups, into the social studies textbook to explore and practice.

Here’s the deal:  If you don’t (a) understand that every paragraph has a main idea and supporting details related to that main idea; and (b) know what the difference is between main idea and supporting details, and (c) know how to identify the idea and details, you cannot:

  • Learn how to determine the important facts in what you are reading,
  • Learn how to take accurate notes in class, or
  • Write an essay

By the time a kid hits the fifth grade, we are requiring them to write multiple-paragraph essays about topics related to social studies or science units.  Our readers with autism don’t get an automatic  pass on that requirement; even if teachers don’t demand a lengthy written report, they do want some display of mastery and understanding, and more often than not, the display has to involve use of main idea/supporting detail concepts.

More to come…