Invariably, when Jack used our classroom library, he headed to my extensive selection of non-fiction books.  Bin after bin of books about animals, habitats, insects, birds, weather, space and other topics of interest were the focus of Jack’s interest.  If I guided him in the opposite direction, toward the leveled fiction books, he’d zoom right back to non-fiction like a magnet to a pole.

Jack had very specific interests, and they were: reptiles, reptiles, and reptiles.  He could, and often did, recite lists of facts about snakes, lizards and turtles like some automated encyclopedia.  It was an intense and mesmerizing experience listening to him talk, and it left one feeling quite bowled over by information. 

Clearly, Jack could read and understand what the text was saying. Equally clearly, however, he wasn’t quite as skilled in what he did with the information as he initially appeared.

For one thing, Jack had no concept of relative importance of the myriad of facts he read. 

When Jack read about the bearded dragon, he didn’t identify which were the really key facts and which were interesting details.  All of the facts he read were both important and interesting.    There was no distinction in Jack’s mind and oral retelling between “the bearded dragon’s natural habitat is the dry, rocky desert areas of Australia” and “they can sometimes be found perched on fence posts in inhabitated areas.”  Both are absolutely fascinating, and therefore must be…important.

For about a day, I worked with Jack on “what’s really important and what’s less important?.”  Besides giving me a big fat headache, it made Jack very confused.  “More” and “less” are tough concepts, especially when it comes to importance.

Then I tried, for about half an hour in a guided reading lesson, the concepts of “things we need to know” vs. “fun facts to know and tell”.  As you can imagine, that went over like a sequined jumpsuit in a tuxedo department.  Jack thought all of the facts were fun to know and tell, and could not grasp that actually, to most people, some things fall into the category of trivia whereas others are quite obviously essential.

One of the side benefits  of teaching readers with autism is that I am constantly being made aware of my own prejudices and biases, how often I push my own opinions into the box labeled “fact,” and how really instinctive it is for me to try to impose my world view on others.  Every time I work with a child on the spectrum I am brought face to face with the unnerving reminder to not get stuck in my own head, and am much the better for it!

It was pretty clear to me by the time my second session with Jack ended that the traditional ways of teaching about main idea and supporting evidence were not going to work and that once again I had to wrap my head around finding a new approach.

This is where I should write about how that very evening, while meditating before a peaceful fire with a glass of wine, I was struck by inspiration.  In reality, it was more like six weeks later, while sorting socks and listening to Barry Manilow singing “Trying to Get the Feeling,” I stubbed my toe on something sharp under the bed, which turned out to be the corner of my copy of The Art of Teaching Reading, by Lucy Calkins. 

I dragged it out, intending to throw it against the wall, when I noticed a post-it marking one of the pages.  Apparently, one night months before, I’d been reading and decided that something on page 323 was important enough to mark before discarding the book on the floor, where it gradually got shoved all the way to my husband’s side of the bed.

Page 323 was all about reading centers, and what I found significant enough to warrant discarding all of the socks for 10 minutes was the table in the middle, which listed different ways to organize centers.  Specifically, the text read “we may organize centers around a kind of book….around a genre of text…around an umbrella topic…a reading goal….”

Of course.  Umbrellas.  That’s what Jack needed!  A visual.  The umbrella statement is the main idea, and underneath it are the supporting details.  I  had completely forgotten about this method of showing kids how paragraphs are organized. 

The next morning, I got together with Jack at a table, and showed him a graphic organizer with umbrellas.  “We’re going to write the big idea inside the umbrella,” I told him, “and all of the details about that big idea under it.”

Jack looked at the pictures of umbrellas and the spaces I’d marked to fill in.  There was no expression on his face.

Undaunted, I got us started.  We had a book about geckos and I asked him to open it to the first page.   After Jack read it, I asked him to think about what was the umbrella idea.  Jack looked at the picture of the umbrella on his graphic organizer.  He was silent.  Nothing.

After a few prompts, he pointed to a sentence about the origin of the name “Gecko”. 

“Hmmmm,” I said.  “How did you decide that this is the big idea?”

He shrugged.  All of a sudden, my very vocal Jack was not talking at all.  He was shutting down quickly.  I had no idea why or what to do about this, so I let him go back to independent reading and moved to another guided reading group.

It was later that day, during P.E., that Jack finally let me see what had confused and troubled him. 

“Umbrellas don’t have anything under them, except a person,” he said.

“Yes, that’s true,” I answered.

“They keep rain off.  They  keep things from being there.”

Well, duh.  Of course this approach wasn’t going to make any sense to Jack.  The visual of an umbrella as the overarching idea was absolutely wrong.  To a concrete thinker like Jack, umbrellas exist to create an empty space where rain should be.  They are protection from things, not holders of them.

I regrouped. 

I really needed more time to piece through exactly what we need to know about a paragraph.  And in doing some more thinking, I realized that before we even think about a main idea sentence/phrase, we identify the topic. 

What Jack needed, before he could articulate a main idea, was to identify the topic of a paragraph and the facts related to it.   How to help him get to that was easier than working the concept of main idea.

What I came up with, eventually, was the concept of a plate and food.  This seemed to work best for Jack, who was almost entirely a visual learner, and whose favorite time of day was lunch.  I got the idea because I noticed that when he unpacked the lunch his mom sent him, he started by pulling out a paper plate.  He then unwrapped each item:  veggies, sandwich, cookies … and put them on the plate in clockwise order starting at the top. 

The next time I met with Jack, I had a set of 5 paper plates.  I put the first one in front of Jack and told him we would not be using it to eat with, but that it would help us work on understanding how the paragraphs in the book about geckos were organized. 

At the end of half an hour, Jack had a handle on it.  Each paragraph was a plate, and the  plate had a name.

 The first plate was called “Where They Live,” and on the top of the plate he’d taken crayons and drawn  circles, each one with a different location caption.

The second plate was called “What They Eat” and included crude pictures of a worm, a roach, and a cricket. 

Now Jack knew that each paragraph is a plate/topic, and that each topic has a lot of facts connected to it.

For the next several weeks, Jack worked on naming the plate/topic and food/facts in different paragraphs he was reading, and we would talk about how he decided what to name the plates and what “food” he put on them.  Gradually, he began to talk more and more about the organization of facts and, although he wasn’t yet thinking in terms of broad vs. specific, he was  getting closer.

Related posts:

1. Non-fiction matters, Part I

I have spent more time thinking about fiction than non-fiction when it comes to supporting readers with autism, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to make it a priority as the kids get older.

Most kids on the autism spectrum (but again, not all) tend to prefer non-fiction books and don’t exhibit as much difficulty making meaning of what the text tells them.   This is because the information in expository text is usually very literal and concrete, and doesn’t require any deep probing for concepts that are, by their very nature, alien to the kids.   

What we learn about rainforest animals in a science text  is straight-forward.  Information about where and how they live, what they eat, and who preys on them can be provided in pictures, diagrams, and simple, clear sentences.   Readers with autism can often read, assimilate, and categorize expository information very quickly and without support.

What we learn about friendship in The Secret Garden, on the other hand, isn’t something we can visualize, takes more than one sentence to describe, and  needs all kinds of words and examples, and the ability to carry ideas forward and stretch them back in the story.  This is hard for many kids in general education!

We must not neglect non-fiction reading with our readers with autism, however.  By the fourth grade, kids are going to need to be able to understand the concept of “main idea and supporting detail;” to identify them, to use them in organizing facts and concepts, and to write them.  If we ignore these essential skills, our readers with autism are going to be limited in what they can do with information they read about.

I re-discovered this foundational piece of expository text comprehension this year when I began to teach the BING, BANG, BONGO method of writing five-paragraph essays to a group of general and special ed students in the fifth grade.  Although at first it appeared that everyone was doing quite well using a planning template to formulate their body paragraphs, I realized after a couple of sessions that more than half the kids were not able to create a main idea sentence (BING sentence, BANG sentence, BONGO sentence) based on the three details they’d chosen for a topic.  As I listened and watched a little longer, I concluded that they weren’t even aware of the fact that all paragraphs have a main idea and supporting details and don’t identify them as they read, much less write.  We are now going back, in guided reading groups, into the social studies textbook to explore and practice.

Here’s the deal:  If you don’t (a) understand that every paragraph has a main idea and supporting details related to that main idea; and (b) know what the difference is between main idea and supporting details, and (c) know how to identify the idea and details, you cannot:

• Learn how to determine the important facts in what you are reading,
• Learn how to take accurate notes in class, or
• Write an essay

By the time a kid hits the fifth grade, we are requiring them to write multiple-paragraph essays about topics related to social studies or science units.  Our readers with autism don’t get an automatic  pass on that requirement; even if teachers don’t demand a lengthy written report, they do want some display of mastery and understanding, and more often than not, the display has to involve use of main idea/supporting detail concepts.

More to come…

Related posts:

1. Non-fiction matters, Part II
2. Reader with autism and figurative language, part 1
3. Autism and hyperlexia, part 1: Anaphoric cuing?

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!

Related posts:

1. Anaphoric cuing: Asking clarifying questions
2. When a reader with autism needs to respond to literature…
3. Autism and hyperlexia, part 2: Helping Bobby read