Author Archives: readers1

Welcome, new readers from Choice Literacy

We got  a  comment this morning from Sarah who tipped us to the wonderful mention we just received in Brenda Power’s The Big Fresh from Choice Literacy newsletter: Read Alouds are a vital component of the literacy curriculum, yet many autistic children do not respond well to them.  With autism on the rise, advice on [...]

Humor and the child with autism

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 [...]

Textual clues to emotion will help with inflection

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.

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

What can we infer is the reason for this character’s behavior? Readers with autism 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?

Asperger Syndrome rolled into new Autism Spectrum Disorder

For those like me curious about the actual proposed wording of the new 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:

What were they thinking? Teach vocabulary!

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.

But then we already knew Sara was edgy…

We Teach We Learn (www.weteachwelearn.org) hosts a monthly blog carnival they call “The Edge of Education.”  We submitted Sara’s post Say what? Asking questions as one reads to the sponsors of the carnival, and they recently published the results, announcing that if they had an award, they’d call it an Edgy and declare Sara to be January’s winner!  [...]

Why I object to the term shadow

You may call me a paraeducator, a paraprofessional, a one-on-one aide, a special education technician, even a teacher’s aide…but please don’t call me a shadow or describe what I do as shadowing. The term shadow suggests that the aide never leaves the side of the child. That describes a bodyguard, not a paraeducator.