http://readerswithautism.com/2009/11/stories-they-help-us-write/
By Sara Finegan
I’ve written a great deal about the specific interventions I use to help kids learn how to make meaning from text. Because kids with autism often do not hold on to a story while they read, much of what we must do to support comprehension involves teaching them about how to think while they read.
The other part of the equation that creates comprehension is, of course, the concept of purpose and engagement in the text. Kids who don’t want to read are not going to understand what they read. Kids who do not read for a purpose aren’t going to get much out of it.
To that end, I’ve posted about finding books of interest for readers with autism and, more recently, my experiences writing serial stories about my students for them to read. There’s another technique that works well with younger or more immature readers, and that is writing stories for the kids to complete.
I got the idea when I happened to buy a book about one of my favorite worlds, Pern (author Anne McCaffrey writes sci-fi, which I don’t ordinarily like, but this series has to do with dragons, and I was hooked). I thought the book was going to be a bunch of short stories about Pern, and it was, but there was a catch. It was one of those “choose your ending” stories, which I hate, hate, hate.
There are many such books available for kids, and many children love them. Readers with autism do not tend to enjoy them, for the simple reason that they don’t feel comfortable using their imaginations in that way. They are perfectly prepared to enter a world of fantasy, where things exist that don’t exist in the real world; they just aren’t willing to write their own endings.
I understand that completely. It occurred, to me, however, that if my readers with autism did like that kind of book, it would be a really great way to get them engaged in a text.
Several weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about fill-in-the-blank worksheets. (I hate it, because when I wake up like that with an idea, I’m too sleepy to flail around looking for a pen to write it down with, even if a shred of paper did exist on my bedside table.) I had no idea why, but as I let my mind drift, the pick-your-own-ending books straggled around the edges of my thoughts.
In the morning, the idea seemed to gel in my caffeine-loaded brain, and I began to work on a story for one of my students who had trouble staying with a narrative. His mind would start to wander and he’d start fake-reading about a paragraph into any text. What I discovered in my new strategy was a way to keep him hooked to the text and striving for meaning all the way through.
I call this particular intervention the “stories we write together,” even though I do most of the writing and all the reader has to do is fill in a word or two here and there. The idea is to write a story for your reader about a topic that interests him or her. Hope that it is a topic for which there are photos or clip art on the web, because you need to illustrate it.
Every few sentences, leave a word blank. When your reader comes to that blank space, he will be asked to fill it in with a word. You can write it, or the student can write it.
What happens when our readers with autism get a high-interest story like this that requires them to be paying attention so that they can add a word or phrase here and there is that they tend to stay with the story, hang on to what’s happening, and enjoy the interaction they have with the text.
TIP: I’m sure you could use stories that already exist – just retype them onto a text document, add illustrations, and insert your own blanks where you think the student will be able to add meaningful words or phrases. Not all of us love making up stories at the drop of a hat.
If you do decide to write your own, don’t worry about the quality. For God’s sake, don’t sweat about character development or setting; the point is to create a narrative that intrigues the child, and believe me, children don’t get wound up over glitches or parts that don’t make as much sense as they could if we spent hours writing the plot.
Here’s an example: “Teddy Meets The Incredible Hulk”. My original had cool illustrations (Google Image is a teacher’s best friend), and you can easily add them to any such stories you write.
You should enjoy this as much as the reader with autism!
Related posts:
- The child in the IEP: Can we really see him as described?
- Irresistible reading: Stories starring our kids as characters
- When a reader with autism needs to respond to literature…
- Role of the classroom aide: To help the child toward independence
- Fiction with a purpose (but one at a time)
