My class is in the throes of what our District  calls a “Unit of Inquiry,” which essentially is a unit of literature study.  Someone has devoted a great deal of time to developing entire courses of study for up to six units per year for each grade level.  The Units of Inquiry focus on different genres of writing and different plot elements, among other things. 

 I’m not  utterly wild about them as a whole, because I think that even for children without learning disabilities, they are pretty advanced and don’t actually match kids’ developmental stages. 

Leo Tolstoy

When I went to school, (and I attended a very good public school in a University town) we didn’t even think about things like “theme” until maybe the 8^th grade.   A precocious reader, I was reading at the college level in the 8^th grade, and I don’t think I would have been able to describe in detail the motivations of the characters as they apply to the author’s theme in most of the texts I made my way through.

 So here we are, in Unit 2 of the fifth grade curriculum, talking about theme, which is an amorphous sort of thing if you are in the fifth grade and a really incomprehensible thing if you are a concrete thinker like a reader with autism.  To top it off, this particular unit is full of figurative language:  metaphor, simile, hyperbole….I read the unit description and immediately reached for Mylanta.

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.    The thing is, though, that the first piece, entitled “My Name,” wasn’t a story if by “story” you mean a narrative with an actual plot and a beginning, middle and end. 

 It was a reflection, I guess, about the name of the character in the book (Esperanza).  And it is, like most of Cisneros’s writing, riddled, frothing, overflowing with figurative language – sometimes multiple similes or metaphors in the same sentence.

 I was not convinced that this would appeal to any reader with autism and pretty sure that my readers with autism were going to be absolutely untouched by the piece. 

 It must have been the sunny weather that made me refrain from kvetching and take a dive into this unit without floaties.  We started reading “My Name” last Wednesday, slowly, line by line, as a whole group (my class is 15-strong).

 I will be writing more about our experiences in the coming days.  For now, I’ll just say this:  On Thursday, we abandoned all of the other texts in the Unit of Inquiry and decided to focus exclusively on Sandra Cisneros stories. They cannot get enough of her!

And, more to the point, I’m learning a lot about how readers with autism can deal with figurative language and deeper meaning in text.

Related posts:

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