readerswithautism.com » connecting

When a reader with autism needs to respond to literature…

readers1 — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:47:13 +0000

By Sara Finegan

What happens when a reader with autism needs to respond to literature?

My focus in reading comprehension instruction this fall is all about responses to literature, and by this I mean writing in depth about what we read.

An essential component to the basic reading response is the way we connect to events, people, or emotions in a story. When we teach students about connections, and model how we make them as we read, we often focus, in the lower grades, on personal connections. I often talk about how I can relate to Mrs. Weasley in the Harry Potter books, because I have a bunch of children of my own, worry about them a lot, and have to throw together meals quite often.

Being able to make personal connections to characters or events is important, because it is a sign that we are getting into the story. I often talk to my students about how reading a piece of fiction is an opportunity to try on a character’s life, or experience another world or community. When we are able to recognize the links between ourselves and others, we on the way to being able to imagine how we would handle a situation in a story, solve a conflict, or respond to events.

Many children with autism are able to make personal connections with just a little push in the form of modeling or direct instruction. Sometimes, partnering up with another reader helps them work through how it’s done.

But many kids with autism, particularly those who have weak social skills or whose internal lives dominate their daily activities, are simply not able to do so, and I don’t see the point in trying to force the issue. Some may, at different developmental stages, be able to do so; others won’t. C’est la vie.

This doesn’t mean that they cannot make connections to text; it just means they aren’t going to readily make personal connections to text.

If a reader with autism has a particular area of interest or fascination, giving him or her fiction books related to that subject is a great way to build comprehension skills. If Daniel is really, really fixated on dragons, there are about 7 different series out there about kids and dragons. Maybe it’s magic and wizarding – again, many, many series. Quirky kids? You’ve got mounds of novels, from Diary of a Wimpy Kid to Encyclopedia Brown to…well, you get the picture.

When kids read books along certain themes, they can demonstrate comprehension and do really well writing responses to literature that draw connections between characters, settings, or conflicts.

Give a child books from the series Dragon Slayers Academy, Dragon Keepers, and Dragon Chronicles. By the time she or he’s read several, you’ll be able to support, with direct or indirect prompts, conversations about the different attitudes the characters have toward dragons, the different ways dragons are portrayed, different kinds of problems characters have about or with dragons, and plenty of other ideas.

Teach a child how to write a comparison/contrast paragraph or two, and you’ll be amazed. (In another post, I’ll show how to teach this type of writing using a formula that anyone can follow, and which works really well with our readers with autism.)

I once had a student who only wanted to read Star Wars novels. We must have had 10 or 15 in the classroom, and Ben was able develop many connections between the worlds and time periods in those novels and our world. He wrote once about how Jedi school compared to California middle school; he particularly enjoyed writing a description of the difference between WWE and Jedi duels in another reading response. With just a little support, he was able to relate very well to the stories he so enjoyed in a way that complied with state standards for reading response.

What we need to do for our readers with autism is to accept and acknowledge that some things are too difficult…right now….and to find alternatives that make sense to both the reader and to us. Creative thinking leads to success.

Role of the classroom aide: To help the child toward independence

readers1 — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:41:54 +0000

By Richard Finegan

This blog is a collaborative effort between my wife Sara and me. She does most of the writing. I do all of the editing, formatting, illustrating (mostly clip art), layout, etc. Since neither of us had ever blogged or had a website before, it has been a new and rewarding experience.

I am a Special Education Tech in a large Southern California school district where I have worked for several years, usually assigned in general education classrooms working one-on-one with students on the autism spectrum. My assignments have included one elementary, two middle, and two high schools and even the school to which they remove students for zero-tolerance violations.

I have a degree in journalism, a law degree, and am only a few hours short of being certified as a mild-moderate special education teacher. So why am I working as a para-educator/classroom aide?

Because I like being able to focus on the students. Only on the students. Not grading 150 of yesterday’s five-paragraph essays, or preparing tomorrow’s lessons, and especially not tolerating all that frustrating, annoying administrative stuff that teachers are expected to deal with. (As an hourly classified employee, I rarely even have to attend staff meetings!)

The role of para-educator

Helping the teachers, of course, is part of our job description but we are not there for the teacher’s benefit (to make copies, or grade homework, or mop the floor, though I’ve done all those things). We are there only because one or more of the kids in that class has an IEP that says they need extra classroom support.

Don’t be shy about telling the teacher when and why you can’t do something they ask you to do if you truly feel it intereferes with something one of your students needs from you.

So what is the role of the special education classroom aide in a general education classroom?

To help the child with an IEP become more independent.

When a child no longer needs me, I have succeeded. When a child continues to depend on me for something other children do without assistance, I have failed. I have asked in the past not to continue with a particular student because I thought they had progressed as far as they needed to go with me.

Tip: I rarely sit next to “my” student. Though I may be in a particular class only because Brandon, or Susie, or Juan is there, I do not want the other kids to know that unless it seems necessary that they know that. I watch my student from a distance, take notes, move in with advice or assistance and move back out again. Meanwhile, I’m helping other students all around the classroom. No student in the classes where I am assigned feels any stigma because I step over and talk to or assist them. Most of them couldn’t tell you why I’m there.

Children on the autism spectrum can be great to work with as an aide.

I worked with a sixth grader who was fascinated by Alfred Hitchcock (they often have intense interests) and wrote an essay about the filmmaker discussing several of his movies. An eighth-grade student on the spectrum was a math whiz who read ahead in his algebra book for fun (and also composed on the piano). A ninth-grader who rarely spoke required almost no help in completing earth science worksheets, finding answers from the textbook.

Yet all of these students, capable as they were in certain areas, had difficulty following even simple plots when reading fiction. I don’t know that they had hyperlexia, but I would think it highly likely. Often this particular reading deficit is not specifically identified.

What can you do to help a child who understands the vocabulary but still can’t follow the story?

Well, you can read Sara’s two posts on this blog about Autism and Hyperlexia. And whether or not your teachers know about or focus on anaphoric cuing, you can use what you learn about it to help any student comprehend narratives, particularly fiction.

Simply put, anaphora are words that refer to other words. Most of us know almost instinctively who “his” refers to when we read:

“Bob slung the backpack over his shoulder and followed Julio.”

A child with autism will often be unsure who is carrying the backpack.

So first, we have to identify the anaphora that may confuse a child. These include more than just the obvious pronouns :

I
we
us
ours
you
yours
he
his
she
hers
they
theirs
them
it
its

but also such words as:

there
then
can
do

When the child encounters these words in reading, we can ask (and teach them to ask themselves)

Where is “there”?
When was “then”?
What is “it”?
Who is “he”?
Whose is “theirs”?
“Can” what?
“Do” what?

Reading connections that most of us make almost automatically the child with autism may need coaching and repeated practice to learn how to make accurately and regularly.

If you, the para-educator, can help a struggling reader learn this seemingly simple reading strategy, you may just open the door to a lifetime of reading enjoyment. It is worth the effort.

====================

PS: I love this slogan “When children can not learn…It’s time to change the way we TEACH” They offer more than 40 products with this alone, and have dozens more autism-related designs. We make not a dime off this endorsement, by the way. http://shop.cafepress.com/design/17338377

Our Goal: Providing help for struggling readers on the autism spectrum.

Say what? Asking questions as one reads

readers1 — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:52:44 +0000

By Sara Finegan

Sam, a sixth-grader, didn’t like to read anything except picture books. His independent reading level was at the fourth grade for non-fiction (he loved science and nature text) and at the low third grade in fiction. The more I conferred with him about his reading, the more it became clear that Sam’s relationship with text was purely passive: whatever meaning came to him came to him, and he made no effort to interact with the text in any way.

Questioning for meaning

Good readers have a relationship with the written word. As we read, we perform a variety of tasks simultaneously, including making inferences, predictions, visualizing, and questioning for meaning. All of these are forms of interactions between our minds and the text. Sam did none of these, and relied purely on words he recognized and the book’s illustrations to bring him any understanding of what the author wanted him to know.

We know that writers have a purpose, and that the purpose generally involves what it is that the author wants us as the reader to think about. Many readers with autism have no concept of why a writer writes, or that readers are supposed to be thinking at all when they read. When I asked Sam what he thought I did when I was reading, he said “look at the words.” I asked if he thought I did anything else. “Look at the pictures?” he said. Anything else? “No?”

Right here is when I made a mistake that took several days to undo. Do not, I repeat, do NOT repeat this at home:

“What do you think I think about when I’m reading?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I think about what the author is telling me.”

“The author isn’t talking,” said Sam, very reasonably and with a bit of concern that I might perhaps be delusional.

“Oh, but she is,” I said. “She is talking in writing. The words she’s writing are her way of talking to us as readers.”

This did not go over well with Sam. Like all readers with autism, he is a concrete thinker and takes everything absolutely literally. Since he could not hear or see the author, the idea that she might be talking to him freaked him out. He began looking for the author and trying to hear her, and worrying that she might not be very nice, and doing all sorts of other mental gyrations that led to a great deal of anxiety on his part.

What to do?

I backtracked. For several days, we read picture books and did not talk about reading or what authors do. In the meantime, I racked my brains to figure out how to convey the idea to Sam that he should be doing something in his head while he read.

As usually happens, I woke up at 2:30 a.m. one weeknight with an idea. It took awhile to sort my thinking out, mostly because my thoughts were careening between “damnit, I have to be up at 4:45 and WHY am I waking up at the crack of 2:30?” and “here’s the deal about relating to text.” Also, Boaz the Siamese cat heard me open my eyes (they are too psychic) and started making pitiful “we are all dying of starvation, please feed us” noises, which contributed nothing to the event.

But here’s what I ultimately came up with: Sam did not need to understand that he had to interact with the text in order to make meaning of it. Sam just needed to interact with the text. And not only that, but he needed to be taught a strategy that would enable him to interact regularly with the text and make meaning from it. A strategy, I decided at 3:25, that would enable him to have an internal dialogue with the text and also be able to summarize what he was reading.

I would like to tell you that during the next few days, I developed a strategy to teach Sam how to do all that, and that from then on, he was an interactive, thoughtful reader. Unfortunately, it took several years, during which time Sam moved on to other teachers, for me to find a really good way to accomplish the objectives I set.

Say What?

For several years, I was lucky enough to teach with a Speech Language Pathologist, Cindy Hale, who not only was interested in language as it relates to reading and writing, but wanted to work in the classroom with kids on comprehension tasks. A couple of years ago, she introduced a reading activity that has colored the world of reading in my classroom. I call it Say What? and it was based on the concept of Storytalk that we’d been using with Cindy to help us write personal narratives. (I’ll write about Storytalk another time).

Question and summarize

We used Charlotte’s Web, but you can use any chapter book at any level with kids in this activity. The idea is to teach kids to question as they read and then to pause and summarize what they’ve been reading. We do it in writing to begin with, as a group, and please bear in mind that it takes a long, long period of interactive work, with a gradual release of responsibility from adult to student, before kids begin to be able to do the work independently. Despite this, the work almost immediately begins to influence their reading, and they love it.

You will need a copy of the text for each student or a document camera with overhead so that everyone can see the text on a screen. If you are working with a group, you will need an easel pad; if you are a parent working with your child, then either an easel pad or lined paper will work.

Draw a line down the center of your paper. I like to use two colors of pen or marker, one for each side. The title of the left column of the paper is “What we know.” The title of the right column is “Questions we have.”

Here’s how it works: You will read aloud, paragraph by paragraph, while the kids follow along. Pause every paragraph (if it’s a long paragraph, you can stop in the middle) to ask kids to contribute questions they have about what is going on. Write the questions in the right column. Ask the kids to let everyone know if they think a question has been answered as you continue reading.

A tip about asking questions:

Concrete thinkers like readers with autism are going to have to learn how to ask deeper questions as opposed to ones which are easily answered in the text. We do not want kids asking what color Fern’s hair was if it has nothing to do with why her father was carrying an axe to the barn. We want kids to develop questions about what is going on that will help them to understand the plot and the characters.

This is easier said than done. One of the best ways to support kids in asking meaningful questions is to emphasize the great questions that they ask and minimize the weaker ones. Thus, Cindy and I would give a little shrug and a one or two word response if a student asked a trivial question. When a student asked a deeper, meatier question, we’d stop, nod at the student, and say something like “Wow, now that is a great question. I like the way you asked that! Let’s write that one down. Wow, that is a good one.” Within a week or so, the questions uniformly became much better in our reading groups.

If a child needs help phrasing a question, either grammatically or because you think he or she is having trouble coming up with the right words, don’t hesitate to intervene and ask the question, then have the student repeat it correctly.

Even if you are teacher who does not normally encourage interruptions, you are going to want the kids to be raising their hands and shouting out when they hear/read an answer to one of the posted questions. This is important. We want the kids to experience what it’s like to not only ask questions as they read, but to recognize when a question is answered and celebrate it. This type of active listening/ reading is crucial to developing an independent interaction with the text. Don’t stifle it.

Every few paragraphs, or whenever there’s a natural pause or change in the plot (change of scene, end of dialogue, mood shift), stop and ask the kids to help you summarize what has happened so far. You’re going to do this as an interactive writing task in the left column. Give the kids sentence starters and have them do most of the summarizing. Intervene if you need to to make sure that the summary goes in proper sequence of events. Pause and ask the kids for good vocabulary words to use. Try to use new words you’ve read and defined in the text, and avoid passive verbs and vague or generic nouns. Once you’ve finished a passage summary, it should be read out loud.

Tip: if you have any good artists in your group of readers, you can assign one of them at a time to draw some illustrations of what you’re reading. I like to draw the kids illustration boxes (like in a comic strip) so that they can make small pictures of the entire series of events as we read. Share out and display!

What I like about this reading activity is that it introduces kids to several concepts at once: asking questions of the text, identifying and using the answers, and summarizing. Because we are also using a chapter book and taking a long time to finish the entire story, we are introducing to the kids another important concept: connecting what we’ve read earlier to what we’re reading now. This is important.

Making connections

One of the things that readers with autism do not tend to do is to make links between what they read in the same text earlier in time with what they are reading in the present. Thus, if they read a bit yesterday of The Schoolmouse they will not connect the information gleaned to what they read tomorrow. Separate events equals separate information, in their minds. Furthermore, they often have difficulty connecting previously read sections of a book even if they just read them 5 minutes ago. To a reader with autism, individual chapters of a book may not be perceived as being related to one another!

By working with kids on questioning and summarizing in a single text on a long-term basis, they learn very quickly that all parts of a novel are related. They see how we will pause to summarize and reflect when we pick up a book again after a break, and how we may stop at the end of a chapter before moving on in order to reflect on where the plot is going or what is happening to a favorite character.

We use the questioning/summarizing technique off and on in my classroom these days. We’ve used it in smaller texts, such as short stories, when we’ve read them slowly over a period of days, and in long, long texts, like Boy of Painted Cave, which took us weeks to complete. In all cases, the kids’ comprehension of what was going on in the plot, and their ability to start thinking more deeply than the literal facts is invariably enhanced. Give it a try!

Out, out, damned plot! Keeping track of “Who…did what?”

readers1 — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:17:32 +0000

By Sara Finegan

Nick loved to bring high level fiction books to school, and eagerly showed them to me each time he walked into the classroom. He proudly informed classroom visitors that he brought his own independent reading from home. Sherlock Holmes and Indiana Jones were two of his favorite characters, though when pressed, he couldn’t tell me much about them.

Nick, diagnosed in the second grade with Asperger’s Syndrome, habitually practiced “fake reading,” and did so without any apparent inkling that reading could be more than just staring at a page and thinking about a movie he’d seen.

During independent reading, when he wasn’t fake reading fiction books he’d brought from home, Nick would lie on the floor and read the same book about dinosaurs over and over again. He didn’t actually read the text; he enjoyed looking at the pictures and identifying each species of the great lizards.

“Tell me what is happening…”

At the beginning of his fourth grade year, Nick stood in front of a bookcase holding baskets of all sorts of stories for more than 10 minutes, unable to decide on a choice. I spoke with him briefly and helped him to select a novel about dragonfighters. The next day, I pulled up a chair next to him and began a conversation about what was happening in the story.

Nick immediately began to tell me about the setting of the book, and that the main character was attending dragon-fighting school. But other than a physical description of the school and the boy in the story, he couldn’t tell me anything. It was clear that he was basing our conversation on the cover of the book and one illustration several pages into the first chapter.

Further observations led me to the conclusion that he was honing in on certain words in each paragraph, and inventing a plot around his perception of the meaning of those words. For example, if he saw the word “dim” in a description of a heavily-forested glen, he would think about the time his mom complained that the porch light was dim, and decide that the events in the text were taking place on a porch!

A series of unrelated events

Additionally, even when Nick did read all of a paragraph as one unit, he was not able to identify which of the characters was speaking or acting. This made following the plot even more difficult. If he didn’t know who did what, he wouldn’t be able to understand the story at all. To him, the book would simply be a series of unrelated events.

I needed to help Nick find a way to keep track of the plot as it happened, and to connect characters to the events in the book. First I had to make sure that he had a reasonable expectation of what the text would do. Nick inspired me to customize an instructional strategy that has since been used to great effect with almost all of my students. I’m not saying they like it. But I am saying that if they do it for a month, they’ll start to read better.

Who….did what?

The plot of a story in a kids’ book is, of course, all about the action, and the action is supposed to be the really interesting part of a book. A kid who cannot understand what is going on is not going to think that reading is very much fun and is not likely to have any expectations of text, which leads to all sorts of other problems in establishing meaning. For Nick, it all boiled down to understanding who was doing what in the story.

You can start this activity as a whole group, or pull a smaller group together for a mini-lesson and some guided practice, or you can use it from the get-go with an individual reader. There are some key concepts that kids need to be instructed in, but complete mastery is not necessary as long as you are there to guide them and have discussions during share-outs.

What constitutes “doing”?

The first concept is about what constitutes “doing” in a text. Kids may or may not know what verbs are, and if they have had any instruction in grammar they’ve probably been told that verbs are “action words”, which is, in my mind, one of the most idiotic definitions we’ve ever used, and I include myself in the “we” part.

Consider this:

“Sara was tired of writing her blog entry. She felt hungry and wanted a nectarine.”

How is being an action? How is feeling an action? How is wanting an action?

But I digress. My point is that we need to model for kids how the kind of verb we are looking for is one where someone is actually doing something, not being or feeling or wanting or having. Make a list of “not doing” verbs and post it in the classroom for kids to refer to. Our list includes “does, do, was, is, were, wasn’t, isn’t, weren’t, have, had, haven’t, hadn’t, want, wanted, wanting, can.…”

Find yourself a short-ish text to read with the kids in which there’s a fun plot. Give a copy to each child and/or put it under a document camera for everyone to follow. You will need an easel pad and markers, or, if you are working with an individual student, a worksheet or lined paper to use. I put my considerable brain to work and came up with a highly-complex and brilliant worksheet that looks like this:

I am donating it to the entire world, so feel free to copy it. Though making your own is also allowed. (Grin)

Now, the deal is that you and the readers are going to proceed very slowly through the text, focusing on what is going on in the plot. (Did I mention that the kids will not particularly enjoy it? Well, they do in groups, but they often aren’t particularly enthralled by the activity when they are asked to do it in independent work. But ask them to give it the old college try for a period of time, and it will change their reading lives.)

Draw a line down the center of the easel pad. On the left column, write the word “Who…” On the right, write the words “Did what?” Now, as you read, you are going to stop every 2-3 sentences and identify who….did what? This is not an exercise in which you will write a summary of the characters’ actions; you are going to list who.…did what? for every single action in a paragraph, at the beginning.

This is important. Emergent readers and people who struggle with comprehension, and epecially readers with autism tend to fragment the text and to fail to pull all of the pieces together in order to get a good visualization of what is going on. Only when you capture every movement and act in a paragraph can your reader with autism start to experience what it’s like to see the story happening, like in a movie. (I will write about learning to visualize in another entry, never fear).

Feelings are not actions: What do you see?

As you work with your students, you’ll encounter many opportunities to discuss the difference between what a character is feeling and what a character is doing. They are related, but one is not the same as the other. Talk with the kids about how this would be shown in a movie. Would you be able to show someone walking to the window? Sure. How about showing “he felt bored”? Notsomuch. Well, how would we know he was bored if it was in a movie? The expression on his face. Ahah!

So, if someone smiles, that is something to put in our Who…..did what? chart, and from that action we can make an inference about how the character feels. This may be over your readers’ heads, but give it a shot. Don’t dumb it down. Maintain a high level of vocabulary, punctuated by lots of real-life examples they can relate to. And push the boundaries of their understanding.

As you proceed in listing the “Who ….did what” information, pause periodically and ask the kids to summarize what’s happened so far. Model it the first few times, until they understand that you are not supposed to read each “Who ….does what?” in order, but rather to give a general description of what’s happened. We do this orally without writing it down in my class, though I introduce it as a written exercise later when the kids are working independently.

Proceed slowly

I tend to use the small-group forum for ongoing activities identifying Who….did what? for a few weeks. Initially, we use picture books but before I send the kids out for more independent work we begin to use short pieces of text without many illustrations. As the kids move in to greater independence in following the plot sequences, be prepared for some backsliding, periodic refresher mini-lessons, and perhaps even the need to work as a group for the first 5-10 minutes of your reading period for up to six weeks.

In my experience, incorporating this activity into a reading unit 2 or 3 times per year is an excellent way to teach and re-enforce the attention to detail and action that is required for good reading comprehension. It can be done at any reading level.