readerswithautism.com » Fiction

So he resists reading: What does he like?

readers1 — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:11:20 +0000

Few children, even those not on the autism spectrum, will voluntarily read something they aren’t interested in.

When we have students with reading comprehension problems, perhaps with hyperlexia, who have difficulty making meaning of what they read, it helps greatly if they care that they don’t get it. Do they want to know about these characters and what is happening to them?

The first task of the the teacher and paraeducator in trying to help a struggling reader is to engage him or her in the reading.

Find something that interests the child.

When your struggling reader with autism is allowed to freely choose a book in the classroom library, what does she choose?

Even “fake readers,” kids who turn the pages, look at the pictures, and recite from memory passages they’ve heard read aloud, will generally return to the same books, or series of books, or subjects (butterflies, horses, ancient Mesopotamia).

When they are being read to, by the teacher in a read aloud, or by a parent, is there something particular they like to have read to them?

This can be a way in for some kids, but often the child with autism has receptive language deficits which make it difficult for him or her to follow a story read aloud.

If they simply don’t (yet) relate to books…

Do they watch animated movies? Finding Nemo? Toy Story? Ice Age? Shrek?
Do they like live action films? Harry Potter? Spy Kids? Spiderman? High School Musical?
Are they crazy about TV shows? ICarly? Wizards of Waverly Place? Suite Life of Zack and Cody?
What about cartoons on cable? Pokemon? Scooby-Doo? Dora the Explorer?

Finding what interests them is a way into their imaginations. Whatever gets and holds their attention, whatever the medium (TV, film, cartoon) can be used to transfer their interest and attention to text. Almost anything produced for kids on film or video is also available in some print form or another.

Knowing what the child cares about allows you to find high-interest fiction tailored just for him or her, and high-interest fiction may be just what it takes to begin engaging that struggling reader and make them care about the story they are reading.

Stories they help us write

readers1 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:41:27 +0000

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!

Irresistible reading: Stories starring our kids as characters

readers1 — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:39:32 +0000

By Sara Finegan

I’m in the process of writing some social stories for an incoming student of mine who is a boy with medium-functioning autism, and it got me thinking about the power of stories about the kids who are actually reading them.

(Social Stories are a tool for teaching social skills to children with autism and related disabilities. They provide an individual with accurate information about those situations that he may find difficult or confusing. The situation is described in detail and focus is given to a few key points: the important social cues, the events and reactions the individual might expect to occur in the situation, the actions and reactions that might be expected of him, and why. The goal of the story is to increase the individual’s understanding of, make him more comfortable in, and possibly suggest some appropriate responses for the situation in question. From http://www.polyxo.com/.)

Many of my students on the autism spectrum have been kids who really, really disliked reading, and avoided it whenever possible. This was partly because they really struggled with the decoding process, and partly because they really struggled with comprehension, and, in some cases, partly because they struggled with focus issues.

Many years back, I hit on a sure-fire way to get kids like that more engaged in reading. I started to write serial stories about kids in my class.

I think the first one I wrote was about “The Day Aliens Kidnapped Eddie and Joey.” It was set at our school, and all of the students in my class, plus my aide and our principal were characters. As I recall, the narrative began when, while waiting for the school bus, Eddie and Joey were suddenly snatched up by an alien spaceship. The aliens were fascinated by homework, and tried to conduct a cross-examination of Eddie and Joey about their assignments. In the meantime, the rest of us were trying to figure out how to save them.

Each of my students had a role in devising a brilliant strategy to get Eddie and Joey back. Our principal, who happened to have a huge supply of hot air balloons in the library storage room, provided both inspiration and logistical support.

Every few days, I’d write another installment of the story, and the kids would gather together in pairs to read and respond. The excitement was palpable. Students began to submit ideas for scenes, and suggestions as to what we could do with the aliens once we reached their space ship (feed them cupcakes….teach them to moonwalk….). Kids in other classes began to hear about the story and wanted copies. It became quite a cool thing to be in my class that month.

Long story short, even kids who hated, hated, hated to sit down with a book waited anxiously for each new installment about Eddie, Joey, and the aliens. They were perfectly willing to read and re-read the story to answer comprehension questions, identify different uses of language (simile, metaphor, hyperbole, dialogue), etc.

Bobby, who had a lot of difficulty connecting to text in general, began to ask a lot of questions about the story: Why did the aliens pick San Diego? What if Eddie and Joey get thirsty? Why can’t the principal just call the aliens? Where is Superman when we need him? (See my other posts about hyperlexia, anaphoric cuing and helping Bobby read.)

Then, Bobby started a running commentary: Eddie and Joey should be careful on the spaceship, because some aliens have slimy skin; Mrs. Finegan should stop singing while she makes helmets for the kids who are going up in the hot air balloon, because it might scare them (!); we should probably eat lunch before we launch the rescue mission, because there’s no food in space.

I managed to stretch out the alien story for about 6 weeks. When we finally finished, the kids continued to read independently for longer periods of time; their stamina had increased by between 4 and 10 minutes. They were more willing to work their way through stories at their instructional reading level, and their interest in setting and characters improved.

Since then, I’ve tried to write short stories featuring my students or, several times a year, another longer tale in installments.

For readers with autism, being a part of the story is a terrific introduction to the concept of “jumping into” a book.

Fiction with a purpose (but one at a time)

readers1 — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:15:09 +0000

By Sara Finegan

You might have noticed that most (but not all) readers with autism prefer non-fiction to fiction.

With the exception of Bobby, all of my students on the spectrum have gravitated toward the fact-based section of our classroom library.

Many of them become mini-encyclopedias themselves as they develop particular areas of expertise due to their highly-focussed interests. They’ll read the same books over and over (and over) again. They’ll re-read the same pages on a regular basis.

They don’t seem to have a whole lot of difficulty understanding expository text. I think I know why.

Why is non-fiction easier to understand?

First, expository text tends to have primarily literal significance. The writing is clear and straightforward, organized and efficient. There aren’t a lot of critical thinking requirements. There are just facts.

To be sure, someone who really wants to have a deep knowledge of a given topic needs to be able to connect, analyze, evaluate and synthesize the facts, and someone on the autism spectrum may not be able to do so very easily. But it is not required.

Secondly, the text doesn’t contain a lot of the features that someone with autism might find difficult. There is very little figurative language, not much in the way of emotions, and there aren’t usually characters one needs to think about in any way other than as actors in a scene. No inferences need to be made, no empathy is necessary.

The text does, however, have certain features that I think have great meaning for a reader with autism:

The text is organized into sections in most of our non-fiction library books.
The chapters don’t go on and on.
There are independent passages separated by photos, topic headings, captions, etc.
One can read just a short piece of the text and get information, make meaning.
Reading stamina doesn’t have to be too great to perform meaningful reading tasks.

And then there’s the fact that the relationship between the reader and the text is much easier than with fiction. The reader can ask questions and get them answered without too much probing. The reader’s job is just to collect information, gather facts, and store them. This is something that many readers with autism are quite good at, and particularly enjoy.

A feeling of competence ensues when a reader with autism can navigate through this kind of text without much difficulty.

What I like about my readers with autism and their relationship to expository text is that it shows me that they very clearly understand about reading with purpose.

Having a purpose for reading is essential to comprehension.

When we read a book about Ancient Egypt, or about shellfish, we have a purpose, which is to learn about how people lived back then, or the different kinds of sea creatures that live on the ocean floor. The text is replete with facts and we know that our job is to collect them. We know, in other words, what we’re looking for. We know what questions we want answered.

It’s not that easy with fiction…

…which is why kids with autism often don’t know how to relate to that kind of text. It’s not immediately obvious what they’re supposed to be looking for, and even if they have an idea, the finding part often requires deeper thinking or more steps.

Inferring might be necessary (which is completely alien to most readers with autism) or comparing one character’s motives to another. If I wasn’t good at making inferences, or if I didn’t know why I was supposed to be reading a novel, I wouldn’t want to read fiction either.

My question is always: How do I harness the skills this reader obviously has when it comes to non-fiction and help her to use it with fiction?

The first thing is to give the reader a purpose. A job, if you will, to do while she’s reading. Something she knows how to do, not something that is alien and uncomfortable. Like…

identifying all of the parts of the setting, or
making a graphic organizer about the relationships between characters, or
physical decriptions of the people in a story.

These are all parts of the story that the reader is probably going to be able to understand without having to do too much work, and since they are all about outward manifestations or connections between people, they call for literal understanding, not in-depth thinking, which we are not going to be working on just yet.

One reading “purpose” at a time

I assign the child only one type of thing to be looking for; no multi-tasking is involved.

TIP: At this point in the reader’s exploration of fiction with purpose, I am not going to give her a long story or a chapter book. In the first exercises of this nature, with these kinds of purposes, I am going to provide her with a short, one-page story with as many familiar text features as possible, including topic headings and maybe a picture or two with a caption. If this means that I need to retype a page to insert headings, I am willing to do that.

The goal is to make the fiction text look as much like non-fiction as possible from a superficial level – it’s reassuring and familiar, and eliminates a lot of anxiety for my reader.

The assignment is quick and dirty, and I expect my reader to come back to me or the classroom aide with a report fairly soon. With any luck, the child will have located the information I asked for, and can repeat it back.

Are we going to try to engage in a long conversation about it? Absolutely not. If this is a child who avoids fiction like the plague, what I am going to do is heap the praise, repeat the information back, and have the child do some sort of quick exercise with me to cement the experience. This might be dictating to me a series of key words found in the text, or doing a quick entry into a graphic organizer. Five minutes.

And then the child is sent off to do something she loves, which might be going back to the same old book about shellfish, or bouncing on a ball. Something pleasurable.

Same text, different purpose

The next time we approach the fiction work, we’re going to use the same text. But now we’re going to assign a different purpose. If the student collected data about the setting during the last read-through, now I’m going to ask her to find out what the characters look like.

Once again, the child is being given a specific purpose to find readily-located information in the fiction passage. And once again, the reporting back is going to be quick, followed by a quick recording activity and a lot of praise.

“How cool! You’re reading a fiction story! And you understand it, don’t you! I’m so proud of you. Now go take a play break.”

I may have the child read the fiction passage 3 or 4 times, each time with a different purpose. I want her to become relaxed with the text, and to experience success in making meaning of what the story is telling.

Lots of practice, short pieces

A reader with autism who is just beginning to experience success in comprehending parts of fiction stories is going to need a lot of practice with short pieces. I try to have a selection available at the child’s independent reading level or a little lower than that, even, so that we can pick and choose several to work on over a two to three week period.

I’ll write about the next steps in another week or two.