Tag Archives: Sara Finegan

Non-fiction matters, Part II

By Sara Finegan 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 [...]

Non-fiction matters, Part I

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

What were they thinking? Teach vocabulary!

Those of us attempting to help struggling readers on the spectrum to comprehend what they read in narrative, in text, are limited by the breadth of the child’s working vocabulary. Anything we can do to expand that working vocabulary pushes us closer to a grade-appropriate level of reading comprehension.

The problem of the read-aloud

By Sara Finegan One of the most frequent questions I get, from special education and general education teachers alike, is how to deal with the fact that their students with autism do not pay attention during story time.  Readers with autism are generally not good listeners and often will not only fail to attend to [...]

Stories they help us write

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.

The child in the IEP: Can we really see him as described?

I do not know how it is possible for anyone to create an IEP that only addresses one part of the reading process. If I am going to support a child in reading, there are many things I want to know besides the simple decoding skills he or she has or does not have:

Irresistible reading: Stories starring our kids as characters

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

Reader with autism and figurative language, part 1

The text was overflowing with figurative language. The first story we were supposed to read was a short piece by Sandra Cisneros, who is a brilliant and evocative author (The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek) whose work is just so amazing I could read it over and over without getting bored.