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.

Related posts:

1. Writing rules for a kindergartner with autism
2. Autism and hyperlexia, part 1: Anaphoric cuing?
3. Don’t stop advocating for the child with autism!

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.

Related posts:

1. First…Then: A kindergartner with autism, Part II
2. Reader with autism and figurative language, part 1
3. Autism and hyperlexia, part 1: Anaphoric cuing?

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.

Related posts:

1. FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension
2. So he resists reading: What does he like?
3. Stories they help us write

Several people have asked me recently which program I recommend to teach kids the mechanics of reading:  decoding and phonemic awareness.  I’m having a hard time answering. 

My problem isn’t choosing between a variety of programs, or determining which is the most successful at helping kids learn to decode the letters and their sounds. 

My problem is that I’m not convinced that decoding is as important as everyone seems to think it is.    Before you start throwing rocks at me, let me explain. 

If you spend any time at all thinking about how you read, you are undoubtedly going to realize that you actually use your phonemic skills to decode words less than 10% of the time.  Maybe less than 5%.  I did a little survey of myself (it was fun, being both the subject and the observer!) and discovered that in 847 pages, I only had to decode one word. 

How can this be?  Isn’t the foundation of reading the ability to put the letter sounds together to form actual words?

Not…..really.  It may be so at the beginning, but I’m wondering if it isn’t a really limited period of time in the life of an emergent reader. 

 What do readers do, really, at all but the primer stage?

 We recognize words. 

 My theory, and it is untested and will not necessarily be particularly popular among reading researchers, is that sight words are more important than decoding skills.  I think that good readers are people who recognize words when they see them.  I think that the difference between any level of reading in elementary school through middle school has more to do the expansion of one’s personal bank of sight words than anything else.  The more words we can recognize and know, the more words we can read.

 Don’t get me wrong:  I still spend time with my students on basic phonemic skills.  I don’t allow people to leave my class without knowing the basics, more or less.  But we spend a lot more time on word recognition, which we work on in a variety of ways.  Much of what we do is outlined in the Reading Category on our other blog, The Demanding Classroom (www.thedemandingclassroom.com).

 Over the years, I’ve had numerous students enter my classroom in the fourth grade and up who still do not know their vowel sounds and blends, and are not able to decode any words that have more than one syllable.  These students have been given intensive interventions, either in self-contained classrooms or in pull-out sessions in the Resource Room, but despite at least four years of work, still have not been able to learn basic decoding skills.

Now, my school’s Resource Specialist is a gem among gems, an incredibly talented teacher with endless patience and know-how.   Teachers in the primary level of our self-contained classroom at our school had more training than I  in reading instruction, and a good many more years of experience.  If they couldn’t get a child to competent decoding levels, there  isn’t a lot I can do. 

It has seemed like focusing intensively on the phonemic skills was not working.   I’ve come to the conclusion that in cases such as these, we need to approach the reading from another angle, and the angle that seems to have the most success is addressing word recognition and reading fluency.

In the coming weeks, I’ll try to post some more about what we do, and why.  In the meantime, check out The Demanding Classroom!

Related posts:

1. Irresistible reading: Stories starring our kids as characters
2. Hearing the story in your head: The role of expressive reading
3. Autism and hyperlexia, part 1: Anaphoric cuing?

If you ask a child with autism to read a story to you, chances are that she or he will read with an almost robotic voice, word for word, with no expression.  Even an accomplished decoder will focus on getting the words right rather than the phrasing. 

Good readers actually “hear” the story in their heads; there’s a voice or a narrator operating in our minds as we read a narrative.   

Our minds identify and process punctuation marks, italics, and other textual clues that tell us where and when to emphasize words and syllables.  Our narrator keeps track of what’s going on in the story so that we can infuse emotion into the dialogue and descriptions.

 This does not seem to happen with most readers with autism.  And when it doesn’t, understanding is crippled.

Read-Aloud is not enough 

 One of the strategies that both general ed and special ed teachers learn early on is to use the read-aloud to foster in our students a love for the written word and an understanding of how reading is supposed to “sound”.  As I commented in another post (“The Problem of the Read-Aloud”), many readers with autism have auditory processing issues and are just not going to be able to hear read-aloud stories and learn from them.

 A couple of activities have worked in my classroom, and they’re fairly easy to implement.  They are the Read Naturally program, and readers theater.  (See separate post on the latter for additional information.)

Read Naturally is an older, but not outdated reading program that addresses reading fluency.  It consists of short, high-interest texts, usually half a page to a page long, with accompanying cassettes.  The tapes are used to introduce a reader to the story and hear the inflection and expression used as it is read aloud.  Kids read the story out loud over and over and over, until they, too, have reached an appropriate level of speed and fluency. 

Tip:  I tend not to use the tapes as often as other teachers do, because I like to read each story to a student and discuss with them how and when I decide to emphasize certain parts and how I decide where to infuse my reading with emotion.  Then I send him or her off to practice.  A child has to read a story between 10 and 20 times to get the right speed, smoothness, and expression.  I might listen to him or her read the story 2-4 times in between practices, so that I can monitor the inflections.

Progress toward expression comes slowly 

What happens when a reader with autism works this hard at reading a story is that slowly but surely, some emphasis and  inflection begins to occur throughout the reading.  In my experience, a reader with autism who works for several months on Read Naturally, which has texts at every half-grade level from primer on up, gradually develops a “feel” for how text should sound. 

 The texts are short enough that the reader can practice for brief periods, interesting enough that most readers with autism enjoy them, and exciting enough that they can find ways to personalize them with expression.

Reader’s theater

The second instructional strategy that often works to help readers with autism develop their own internal narrator is the use of readers theater.  Put a child in a group of peers with similar reading levels, and give the group a quirky, funny script to read.  They will have fun and try on all sorts of voices, mannerisms, and methods of expression.

I usually introduce the script to the kids and hang out with them as they work their way the first couple of readings.  They often like to switch parts frequently, and that’s just fine, though a reader with autism may wish to stick with the same character – that’s also fine.

Tip:  Once they are all sure about the words and the story line, I like to assign leaders and let them work by themselves for awhile.  Our classroom aide checks in periodically to make sure they’re on task.

What we find is that very quickly, all of the students are experimenting with accents, voices, and inflection of the phrases.  When students experience this out loud, they are far more likely to internalize the knowledge and use it later in their independent reading. 

Hearing the internal narrator

I believe that once a reader with autism hears the internal narrator during independent reading, comprehension naturally improves and expectation that the text will tell a cohesive story increases exponentially.

Related posts:

1. FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension
2. So he resists reading: What does he like?
3. Irresistible reading: Stories starring our kids as characters

Bobby approached my kidney-shaped conference table hesitantly, walking on tiptoe around the nearby rocking chair.  He was carrying a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  I greeted him; he did not meet my eyes. 

This was the first day of the second week of school, and we had fashioned name tags, written letters for school mail, smelled Jamie’s flatulence several times, learned about Georgia O’Keefe, and made a sheet cake into a replica of the State of California.  Earlier this morning we had chosen our favorite books.  Now I was beginning to conduct some assessments of my new students’ reading abilities.

 Bobby opened to the first chapter of the book and began to read for me: 

Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways.  For one
thing, he hated the summer holidays more than any other time
of year.  For another, he really wanted to do his homework, but
was forced to do it in secret, in the dead of night.  And he also
happened to be a wizard.

Bobby read quickly and smoothly and made no errors.  I raised my eyebrows as he continued, his tongue tripping over the words and his eyes fixated on the page.  This was a reader.  This was a fourth grader who could read Harry Potter.   I motioned for him to stop.

 “So,” I said casually, “what is going on with Harry?”

 Bobby looked anxious.  I could almost see his mind turn inwards.  He seemed absorbed in some internal sensory experience that I could not share.  I pulled him back. 

“Bobby?  How is Harry different from other kids?” 

“I don’t know.”  

I did a quiet mental double-take. 

“Can you find it in the text?”

 He scanned the first page.  Shook his head.  Bobby did not understand a word he had just read.   No matter what I asked, how I prompted, or where I pointed in the text, he made no meaning at all of the words. 

I sent him back to his seat with a Dumb Bunny book.  I sat back and watched him turn the pages, laughing vaguely and pointing at the words.

»  »  ¤  «  «

 Bobby was my first student with autism.  I had just changed the focus of my work in San Diego from a middle school ED class (which stood for “emotionally disturbed” though that was rarely spoken) to a mild-moderate Special Day Class for fourth, fifth and sixth graders. 

On the first day of that school year I met Bobby, who was moving to the upper level SDC class after two years in the lower grades at my new school.  He was compliant, wanted to please, and was completely accepted by his classmates.

The results of that first reading conference were confirmed when I administered the Analytical Reading Inventory (ARI): Bobby could decode at the ninth grade level.  His comprehension was at the primer level. 

A review of his Language Arts standardized testing results for the previous year revealed that he consistently scored “Far Below Basic” on the CAT-6 test each spring.  In October, the kids took the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) test, which consists of a series of cloze exercises.  Bobby scored, once again, Far Below grade level.

Hyperlexia

Bobby has hyperlexia, which is a precocious ability to decode words in text with next to no understanding of what they mean. 

Children with autism tend to share some common learning characteristics, not the least of which is deficits in reading.  Within the realm of reading comprehension, they generally exhibit difficulties making sense of complex sentences, struggle with figurative language, make few inferences or in any way access their background knowledge, and connect to fiction text in minimal fashion. 

When a child with autism decodes at a high level but has considerable comprehension deficits, she or he cannot learn strategies for inferring, integrating text, or making personal connections to text unless the hyperlexia is first confronted.

 This blog post is the story of my next two years with Bobby, and why, as he completed the fifth grade, all standardized and authentic assessments confirmed his ability to both decode and comprehend at grade level or higher. 

So what could I do to help?

Bobby not only introduced me to hyperlexia, but bore with me when I discovered that there was but one professional journal article which provided a hint about a potentially-significant intervention for this particular reading disability.  By necessity, we were forced to follow up on it in our own way, on our own.
 
 The first hundred or more times I attempted to locate information on interventions that work in cases of hyperlexia I drew a complete blank.  Most of the professional literature pertaining to hyperlexia has to do with defining it and describing it.  There are very few articles that describe how to fix it.

I didn’t particularly care why Bobby had hyperlexia, or how it manifested; I wanted to know what to do about it to help him make meaning when he read. 

I became increasingly frustrated in my research, which was my first entrée into investigating teaching strategies for working with kids with autism.  Plenty of people wanted to describe their child’s hyperlexia.  Plenty of researchers wanted to discuss whether it was a part of autism or a part of language disorders.  Nobody really had any useful ideas about how to handle it in the classroom.

Success!  Sort of…

 Finally, late one night while I was on vacation in New York, I did one last, desperate Google™ search.   And up popped an abstract of an article describing a test of three different interventions: pre-questioning strategies, cloze exercises, and something called “anaphoric cuing.”  Only the last intervention showed success in improving reading comprehension. 

[O’Connor, I.M. & Klein, P.D. (2004).  Exploration of strategies for facilitating the reading comprehension of high-functioning students with autism spectrum disorders.  Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(2):  115 -127]

Ahah!  But what is anaphoric cuing and how did the researchers use it? 

By yet another bit of poor luck, I was unable to obtain a good copy of the article for several months.  Lacking patience, I decided to go ahead and try to figure out what anaphoric cuing was on my own.  The first thing I had to do was locate the definitions of all of those big words.  I learned the following from a variety of sources:

Definitions

• Hyperlexia is a reading disorder characterized by a precocious ability to decode words, usually two or more levels above the child’s age or grade, combined with significantly impaired comprehension of the same words.
• Anaphora are words, often pronouns, which refer back to reference words previously used in the text.  For example: “Dan went to his locker to retrieve his jacket.”  In this case, “his” is the anaphora and “Dan” is the reference word.
• Anaphoric cuing involves teaching the child to identify anaphora and to pause to relate them to their reference words while reading.  In this way, the child begins to understand text as an integration of phrases and to connect the parts of the text to one another.  The active engagement required to relate words to one another supports the child’s connection to the text and reduces his or her habit of passive decoding.

O’Connor and Klein’s study 

Eventually I obtained their article and learned that Irene O’Connor and Perry Klein, both of the University of Western Ontario, had worked with 20 adolescent students with hyperlexia to explore the success of cloze questions, pre-reading questions, and anaphoric cuing. 

While instruction using the first two techniques had little impact on the quality of reading comprehension, anaphoric cuing resulted in significant improvements.

O’Connor and Klein suggested that students with hyperlexia do not understand that anaphora refer back in the text and the researchers theorized that if such students could be coached to stop and identify the reference made by the anaphora, reading comprehension would improve.

They selected several texts in which 12 anaphora were underlined, and underneath each one provided three choices as to the reference word.  Students were encouraged to pause at each underlined word and choose the correct reference word. 

The students demonstrated the ability to pause and consider each underlined anaphora accurately, choosing the correct reference word 5 of 6 times.  In addition, their ability to answer comprehension questions following the session of anaphoric cuing was demonstrably improved.

But in the winter of Bobby’s fourth grade year, with only an educated guess of what “anaphoric cuing” must involve, I began to work with him.  What exactly did I do?

That will be the subject of my next post.

Related posts:

1. FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension
2. Anaphoric cuing: Asking clarifying questions
3. Reader with autism and figurative language, part 1