Just a couple of observations about two high school students I have worked with recently:

One writes in short, concrete sentences, almost always in the present tense, even when he’s journaling about what he did yesterday.  Is verb tense, particularly when writing, a common problem for kids on the spectrum?

Both of these students (and one is much nearer the Asperger’s end of the spectrum than the other) are capable of reading aloud with inflection if they KNOW what the emotion of the speaker is supposed to be. If there are textual clues that the speaker is angry or happy, they know how that sounds. I find this interesting since one of my students speaks in a monotone generally and reads routinely in a very soft tone.

Yet if the text says something like:

John was angry. “Give me my backpack!” he demanded–both will add appropriate, louder, inflection when reading John’s words.

To get a student with autism to read with inflection, especially the younger ones, perhaps we need to TELL them what the emotion of the speaker is.  They usually won’t infer this from the situation, even though most of us will.  But they know how an angry person sounds if they know he’s angry.  Or a happy person.  Or a sad person.

The more they recognize the different tones of voice, the easier it will be to infer emotions in daily communication.  Perhaps.

Related posts:

1. Inference Cuing: What is the most likely reason for that?
2. Hearing the story in your head: The role of expressive reading
3. Autism and hyperlexia, part 1: Anaphoric cuing?

It has frequently been observed that children on the autism spectrum  tend to be concrete and literal thinkers who have difficulty with abstract concepts like inferring a character’s unstated motive.  When reading fiction, the concrete thinkers will focus narrowly on the minute physical details and often miss the “big picture.”

Fernando’s red jacket flapped in the wind as he raced on his new bicycle down Maple Street.  Ignoring the stop sign at the end of the block, Fernando ran straight into the side of a passing city bus.  When he woke up he heard a siren and realized he was in the back of an ambulance.

The child with autism should have no difficulty telling you that Fernando’s jacket was red, and his bike was new.  He probably would be able to report that Fernando ran into a bus.

Yet some may not recognize that the person in the ambulance is Fernando, because Fernando’s name is not stated in the last sentence, only the pronoun “he” is used (an example of anaphora).  Children with autism frequently will not connect one sentence to the next, even within paragraphs.

While it may seem to us both obvious and critically important for the reader to recognize that Fernando is injured, the child with autism may make no such connections without coaching.  They do not always think about the ramifications of coats flapping in the wind, bicycles speeding, and stop signs ignored.  The visual image of a child’s body striking the side of a moving bus does not automatically come to them, or necessarily suggest to them an ambulance ride to the hospital, or worse.

Anaphoric cuing (about which there are several articles on this blog) teaches the child to stop when he gets to anaphora and ask himself who or what, or where or when or why questions to focus his attention on the meaning of what he is reading by identifying the referent words.  The reader needs to think about who is waking up in an ambulance, and why.  Was Fernando napping or was he knocked unconscious?

Inferring motive

A character’s motives may be similarly difficult for the child with autism to recognize, even when they seem clear to most readers.

Bob’ s favorite green Boston Celtics hat was missing from his locker!  He looked up and down the hallway and spotted George wearing a green hat!  Bob ran down the hall, shoved George against the wall, and grabbed the hat off his head.  As Bob was walking away, he noticed that the green hat he was holding said Dallas Mavericks.

The child with autism might know that Celtic hats are green, might know Bob’s was missing, might know the hat George was wearing was green, and yet may be stumped by the question:  Why did Bob shove George and take his hat? Since the text does not explicitly say that Bob suspected George of taking his hat, the reader with autism might not make this seemingly obvious inference.

How to infer state of mind, emotion, or motive from a character’s actions is something that must be taught patiently to young readers with autism.  Often the teacher or aide must have to learn how to recognize themselves when they are inferring so they can guide the student to a similar inference.

What is most likely?

When a character is described as frowning and speaking loudly, we may infer “anger” without even being aware we made an inference.

Julia waited on the front porch of Elizabeth’s house for 15 minutes.  When Elizabeth finally came outside, Julia frowned and asked loudly, “Can we go now?”

The concrete thinker, if asked, might surprise us with the number of other possible (if implausible) explanations for speaking loudly while frowning.  They can always come up with fanciful scenarios (“maybe a caterpillar crawled in her ear“) which have no connection whatsoever to the text.  They may need to be prompted to focus their thinking on what is most common and most likely under the circumstances of the story.

• What are the most common reasons why someone would do that?

• What is the most likely reason this character is doing that, considering what just happened to her?

Keeping track of details is a strength

When instructing a whole classroom of students, most of which do not have autism, on a long piece of fiction one may discover an advantage that many readers with autism have: they can often keep track of a surprising number of minor characters and minute details, even if they have difficulty connecting them.

A high school student with autism, having studied an abridged version of Romeo and Juliet for several weeks in class, was watching the Zefferelli film and laughed to himself when Romeo’s servant, Balthazar, passes a monk on a donkey while on his way to Mantua to tell Romeo of Juliet’s apparent death. “Friar John” the student said.  Friar John was not named in the version of the play studied.  The name was mentioned once in class weeks before.

I have also observed (to my surprise) that some children with autism are as capable as other kids of learning the meaning of idioms such as “nose to the grindstone” or “sick as a dog” or “hold your horses.”  In fact, they may even recognize the humor in certain idioms, once they learn the meaning, that others more familiar with the terms may overlook.  Drawing an absurd picture to illustrate a witty idiom may be great fun for these children.

Related posts:

1. FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension
2. Anaphoric cuing: Asking clarifying questions
3. Autism and hyperlexia, part 1: Anaphoric cuing?

Q: Is it “anaphoric cuing” or “anaphoric cueing”?
A: Yes.

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Q: What are anaphora?
A: Anaphora are words, often pronouns, which refer back to reference words previously used in the text. For example: “Dan opened his book, put his head down on it, and fell asleep.” In this case, “his” and “it” are the anaphora and “Dan” and “book”  are the reference words.

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Q: What, briefly, is anaphoric cuing?
A: Anaphoric cuing involves teaching the child to identify the anaphora and to pause to relate them to their reference words while reading. In this way, the student begins 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.

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Q: Who first identified anaphoric cuing as an effective intervention for teaching reading comprehension to children on the autism spectrum?
A: Researchers Irene O’Connor and Perry Klein, both of the University of Western Ontario (Canada),worked with 20 adolescent students with hyperlexia to explore the success of cloze questions, pre-reading questions, and anaphoric cuing. They found anaphoric cuing to be the most effective teaching strategy for improving reading comprehension with these students.
[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]

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Q: What is meant by hyperlexia?
A: 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. Many children on the autism spectrum have this difficulty, even though they may not be diagnosed with hyperlexia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia)

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Q: Has O’Connor and Klein’s study been “proven” in the classroom?
A: This blog’s primary author, Sara Finegan, has had success with the technique (http://readerswithautism.com/2009/09/autism-and-hyperlexia-part-1-anaphoric-cuing/ and http://readerswithautism.com/2009/09/autism-and-hyperlexia-part-2-helping-bobby-read/ ) and would like to hear from other teachers or parents about their experience with anaphoric cuing or any other teaching strategy that has worked to improve reading comprehension by students on the autism spectrum.

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Q: How did Sara learn to do this?
A: As her first posts show, Sara and her student, Bobby, worked it out for themselves.  The process is not complicated. Paraeducators (paraprofessionals, classroom aides) can help to implement it. (http://readerswithautism.com/2009/12/anaphoric-cuing-asking-clarifying-questions/ and http://paraeducatorcentral.com/2011/02/role-of-the-classroom-aide-to-help-the-child-toward-independence/)

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Q: Does the technique work with students trying to improve reading comprehension in another language besides English?
A: We don’t know for sure, but would assume that in any language that uses pronouns or other anaphora regularly in text, large numbers of children on the autism spectrum have difficulty with comprehension. This technique could be tried to see if it helps and PLEASE let us know what your results are.

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Q:  I’m a teacher (or parent) willing to try anaphoric cuing but I have questions.  Can I contact you?

A:  Certainly.  We want you to Post a Comment to any one of our articles, including this one (see below), or you may Contact Us ( http://readerswithautism.com/contact-us/ ) by email.  We will respond to any communication from an educator or a parent trying to help a struggling reader.

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

Related posts:

1. Anaphoric cuing: Asking clarifying questions
2. Hearing the story in your head: The role of expressive reading
3. Autism and hyperlexia, part 1: Anaphoric cuing?

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 read-alouds, but may disrupt the experience of others when it is going on.

I like to think of myself as a dynamic and interesting teacher, one who can keep a child’s interest most of the time, even when the subject we are learning isn’t utterly fascinating.   At any rate, that’s what I aim for, and it usually happens that kids are engaged most of the time in my classroom.

I love read-alouds!

One of my favorite events of the day, is the read-aloud.  We read high-level books, often novels related to what we’re studying in history, to bring that world alive and show how dry facts aren’t just words in a textbook.  We also read funny stories, fantasy books, and fables.   I like to use accents and unique voices to represent characters, and incorporate a lot of drama into the reading.   My students are usually captivated.  Except the ones with autism.

It used to be really disconcerting to look up from a particularly scary rendition of a scene in a Goosebumps story to see my student Bobby looking off into space and laughing at shadows or dust motes floating in the air.   I became rather discouraged when my best Draco Malfoy imitation didn’t even seem to have any effect on him, nor did my ancient old-lady-Charlotte-the-dying-spider voice.   If I hadn’t understood him and how he perceives sound, I’d have given up all aspirations of becoming a reader for Books on Tape.

“Wah…wah…wah…”

Kids with autism do not tend to be auditory learners and most of them do not respond well to the read-aloud.   In fact, the majority of them drift off into their own worlds when I read aloud to the class.   I am reminded of the Charlie Brown television specials, where the teacher’s voice in class is unintelligible, consisting of droned “Wah…wah…wah….” I imagine that is how my students with autism hear me when I’m reading to them.

It doesn’t matter what tone of voice I use, what accent, or how loudly or softly I intone.  They aren’t really present for the reading.  Not very flattering to any teacher, of course, but even more important, it raises the question of how to support the students’ learning if they aren’t attending to the read-aloud.

What is the purpose of the read-aloud?

If you’re struggling with a reader with autism’s inability to listen to the text, stop for a moment and ask yourself why it’s important.   In evaluating how to handle this situation, it is important to consider the express purpose for the read aloud, and determine whether there are alternative ways to get the objectives met.   So, first consider whether:

• The read-aloud is used for the primary purpose of exposing kids to necessary and important text that is higher than their own reading level.

Kids who do not read at grade level often need grade-level texts read to them in order to be able to participate in literacy activities such as response to literature, literary discussions, and just accessing the classics.  If the objective is related to cultural literacy, then a child’s ability to attend to and learn from a read-aloud may be important.  I think we’d all like for every child to have read certain books by the time they finish elementary school:  Charlotte’s Web comes to mind, for example.  If the book is higher than the child’s independent reading level, then understanding the story read aloud could be an essential expectation. But…if your student doesn’t read the book, can you show the film in class? And if not, can it wait?

• The read-aloud is used to expose the kids to the pleasure of the written word.

Reading fluency is not always strong in the early and intermediate process. We need to help kids hear the text in order for them to develop expectations of text and enjoyment of the process. We do want our children to love reading and get pleasure from the written word. It’s good for kids to experience the flow and fluency of text – many of them will not develop the internal voice as readers unless they first hear it externally.

Whether they hear stories on tape or “live,” the fact is that a voice and an auditory experience is important. If the read-aloud is for the purpose of exposing kids to the pleasure of the written word, we may need to accept that for some kids, it’s not going to happen the way we’d like. Maybe your student with autism will enjoy hearing your voice even though  he or she isn’t retaining the words and ideas themselves.  Maybe your student will hear some of the words you are reading and will use his or her imagination to use those words in a different way. And maybe the student will never come to love the sound of the written word, or understand that words are arranged in a pattern that has melody and fluency. There are other things the child will learn that are equally, if not more important this year.

• The read-aloud is used in writing intruction to show kids how words, the rhythm of language, and rhymes can influence a text.
  

The use of read-aloud to support lessons in writing instruction is a best practice employed by most literacy teachers. We can tell kids how mood, and setting, and action are influenced and directed by the use of language and rhythm, but they need to hear it as well as hear about it. It gives them ideas and inspiration to try the techniques out on their own.

Now, if the way words sound is the entire point of the read aloud, there may be alternative ways to teach the lesson to a child with autism. Bobby may not be able to listen to and completely understand a story in which repeated words or rhymes convey a message or mood, but he can learn about and use rhymes in songs and nursery rhymes just as well. He didn’t learn anything when I read aloud When I Was Young and In The Mountains, but he was easily able to write a little story using a repeated introduction after we sang “Old McDonald” and “Do You Remember?”

• The read-aloud is used as a warm-up or cool-down exercise for kids as they prepare to transition to other tasks.

Many teachers have a read-aloud session immediately after recess or lunch to help kids settle down and get ready for active learning again. Reading aloud to kids to help support transitions or to give them a break from written work or intensive intellectual work is a tried and true strategy that many of us have been using for years. It is derived from the bedtime story, and how many of us don’t have memories of drowsing while our parents read us one last book before turning out the lights? This type of read-aloud not only calms the mind and body, but introduces the concept of reading for relaxation to a child.

• The read-aloud is used as a break from other academic tasks.

Research shows that the best learning is accomplished in cycles of input and output of information. Reading is an excellent respite of intake that can be used after an intensive output of intellectual effort. If reading is for relaxation and transitioning, then a child can gain equivalent results from drawing pictures, rocking, doing a puzzle, or some other pleasurable quiet activity.

While you are doing the reading aloud, your students who are weak in auditory processing can be engaging in separate activities—so long as they are able to do so independently and without disturbing others.  One of my students has always loved to draw dragons, and this is his invariable free choice activity.  When everyone moves to the rug for the read-aloud, he pulls out his sketchbook and begins to draw.  Sometimes his dragon pictures actually end up having something to do with what I’m reading aloud; sometimes they simply express whatever is going on in his own mind.

• The read-aloud is used to engage kids in bringing a period of history or a certain situation they’ve read about in other contexts to life.

Students studying the pioneer period love hearing the Little House books read to them; I remember how the colonial and revolutionary period came alive for me when I read Johnny Tremaine. I link genre studies to our history units; we read Aesop’s fables when we study Ancient Greece and a number of Native American legends when we study early America. We explore the mystery genre by reading The Golden Goblet and A Place in the Sun when we study Egypt, and similar novels based in Rome and Greece. We study the Coming of Age genre when we study early man by reading Maroo and the Winter Cave, Boy of Painted Cave, and Dar and the Spear Thrower.

Very few of these texts are able to be accessed by my students on their own; hearing them read, with accents and emphasis, drama and even passion, helps the kids visualize and synthesize information they’ve been learning from their social studies textbooks.  It is important that kids learn that history is a live and pulsating thing, no question about that.  The plethora of excellent books for children and young adults about historical people and events is terrific.  Kids who cannot read them on their own will miss out on some wonderful pieces and likely will not be able to truly envision the times and circumstances about which they have studied.

On the other hand, they can gain some insights from more visual resources, including some of the great pictorial books about historical eras, films, and doing arts and crafts projects.  Just because a child doesn’t truly hear the story of how Laura Ingalls’ father built a log cabin doesn’t mean that she or he can’t find out about them by building a replica; we can learn about candlemaking from reading a story about Laura and her mother, or we can dip them ourselves.

When the child’s attention is essential…

If you determine that the child’s attention to the read-aloud is essential, and that you want to support his or her participation in the experience, there are a few things you can do as a part of the routine.

Here is a list of some strategies that have worked with some of my students with autism.   In addition to these, I’ve had great success with several of my students with autism by using a read-aloud in conjunction with exercises related to questioning as we read.   This intervention is discussed in another blog entry.

…five possible solution tips

1. Give the student have a copy of the text to follow along with.  Having a visual aid is often helpful in keeping a child’s attention on the read-aloud.
2. Make finger puppets or paper puppets on a craft stick for the child to hold up when a given character is speaking or discussed.  The child will follow along as you read more easily if he or she is waiting to hear from or about a character.
3. Ask your students to provide the sound effects for a story.  If you are reading about a storm, set an auditory signal (“sound effects!” or “It sounded like….”) for them to begin making rain or thunder noises. A child with autism will try to pay attention for the opportunity to participate.
4. Ask your student with autism to draw a picture of what you are reading as she or he listens.
5. Rewrite passages from the text into a readers’ theater experience and assign your student with autism to one of the parts.   Let the kids practice and then perform for a small group.

No cookie cutter children!

Use these modifications sparingly.  If it’s really not important that the child be able to hear the read-aloud, don’t try to force it.  Save the interventions for times when it’s essential.  Readers with autism, by their very nature, do not fit into any cookie-cutter classroom view, and we need to pick and choose the times and methods of required conformance.

Related posts:

1. When a reader with autism needs to respond to literature…
2. Hearing the story in your head: The role of expressive reading
3. Autism and hyperlexia, part 2: Helping Bobby read

When we have students with reading comprehension problems, perhaps with hyperlexia, who have difficulty making meaning of what they read, it helps greatly if they care that they don’t get it.  Do they want to know about these characters and what is happening to them?

The first task of the the teacher and paraeducator in trying to help a struggling reader is to engage him or her in the reading. 

Find something that interests the child.

When your struggling reader with autism is allowed to freely choose a book in the classroom library, what does she choose?

Even “fake readers,”  kids who turn the pages, look at the pictures, and recite from memory passages they’ve heard read aloud, will generally return to the same books, or series of books, or subjects (butterflies, horses, ancient Mesopotamia). 

When they are being read to, by the teacher in a read aloud, or by a parent, is there something particular they like to have read to them? 

This can be a way in for some kids, but often the child with autism has receptive language deficits which make it difficult for him or her to follow a story read aloud.

If they simply don’t (yet) relate to books… 

• Do they watch animated movies?  Finding Nemo?  Toy Story?  Ice Age?  Shrek?
• Do they like live action films?  Harry Potter?  Spy Kids?  Spiderman?  High School Musical?
• Are they crazy about TV shows?  ICarly?  Wizards of Waverly Place?  Suite Life of Zack and Cody? 
• What about cartoons on cable?  Pokemon?  Scooby-Doo?  Dora the Explorer?

Finding what interests them is a way into their imaginations.  Whatever gets and holds their attention, whatever the medium (TV, film, cartoon) can be used to transfer their interest and attention to text.  Almost anything produced for kids on film or video is also available in some print form or another.  

Knowing what the child cares about allows you to find high-interest fiction tailored just for him or her, and high-interest fiction may be just what it takes to begin engaging that struggling reader and make them care about the story they are reading.

Related posts:

1. FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension
2. Irresistible reading: Stories starring our kids as characters
3. Hearing the story in your head: The role of expressive reading

In their book The Mosaic of Thought (1997) Keene and Zimmerman identified six“cueing systems” which they described as the channels or sources through which the brain receives information during reading:

• grapho-phonic cuing–the identification of letters and sounds
• lexical or orthographic cuing–the identification of sight words
• syntactic cuing–the recognition of the form and structure of language
• schematic cuing–prior knowledge or association
• pragmatic cuing–the purposes and needs of the reader
• semantic cuing–the meaning of the text

The authors identify a sample semantic cuing problem:  reading words fluently but experiencing difficulty defining what is meant by a word, sentence, or text. (p. 203)

This is precisely where we often find our kids with autism (and always those with hyperlexia) stuck in their comprehension.  And this is where (with due credit to the study done by O’Connor and Klein, 2004) we find anaphoric cuing (also spelled cueing) as a useful semantic cuing tool to help get them unstuck. 

See Autism and hyperlexia, Part 1, http://readerswithautism.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=256 .

Comprehension problems are not unique to kids on the autism spectrum, and some practical hints on how to use anaphoric cuing can be gleaned from the literature on reading comprehension generally.

As Cris Tovani notes in her book I Read But I Don’t Get It (2000), good readers ask themselves clarifying questions as they read.  Who, what, when, where, and why questions about characters, setting, or events.  (p. 52)  Asking themselves these clarifying questions focuses the reader on meaning, not simply on decoding, word by word.

But if the child with autism or hyperlexia has lost the meaning of what they’re reading, how do they know what questions to ask themselves? 

There is the beauty of the anaphoric cuing technique.

With a fairly short list of anaphora (words that refer to other words) that can be listed on a bookmark  we can teach them when to stop in their reading and what to ask themselves before they move on.

When we read:

he, she, they, we, I, you

we ask who?

When we read:

hers, his, its, theirs, ours, yours

we ask whose?

When we read:

it, that, this, can, do

we ask what?

When we read:

here, there, come, go

we ask where?

When we read:

then, before, after

we ask when? 

By learning a list of specific words and answering a few related questions, many kids can make significant improvement in their comprehension of text, particularly narrative fiction, which often is the most difficult for a child with autism to comprehend.

Related posts:

1. FAQs about anaphoric cuing and reading comprehension
2. Autism and hyperlexia, part 1: Anaphoric cuing?
3. Autism and hyperlexia, part 2: Helping Bobby read

I’ve written a great deal about the specific interventions I use to help kids learn how to make meaning from text.  Because kids with autism often do not hold on to a story while they read, much of what we must do to support comprehension involves teaching them about how to think while they read.

The other part of the equation that creates comprehension is, of course, the concept of purpose and engagement in the text.  Kids who don’t want to read are not going to understand what they read.  Kids who do not read for a purpose aren’t going to get much out of it.

To that end, I’ve posted about finding books of interest for readers with autism and, more recently, my experiences writing serial stories about my students for them to read.  There’s another technique that works well with younger or more immature readers, and that is writing stories for the kids to complete.

I got the idea when I happened to buy a book about one of my favorite worlds, Pern (author Anne McCaffrey writes sci-fi, which I don’t ordinarily like, but this series has to do with dragons, and I was hooked).  I thought the book was going to be a bunch of short stories about Pern, and it was, but there was a catch.  It was one of those “choose your ending” stories, which I hate, hate, hate.  

There are many such books available for kids, and many children love them.  Readers with autism do not tend to enjoy them, for the simple reason that they don’t feel comfortable using their imaginations in that way.  They are perfectly prepared to enter a world of fantasy, where things exist that don’t exist in the real world; they just aren’t willing to write their own endings. 

I understand that completely.  It occurred, to me, however, that if my readers with autism did like that kind of book, it would be a really great way to get them engaged in a text.  

Several weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about fill-in-the-blank worksheets.  (I hate it, because when I wake up like that with an idea, I’m too sleepy to flail around looking for a pen to write it down with, even if a shred of paper did exist on my bedside table.)   I had no idea why, but as I let my mind drift, the pick-your-own-ending books straggled around the edges of my thoughts.

 In the morning, the idea seemed to gel in my caffeine-loaded brain, and I began to work on a story for one of my students who had trouble staying with a narrative.  His mind would start to wander and he’d start fake-reading about a paragraph into any text.  What I discovered in my new strategy was a way to keep him hooked to the text and striving for meaning all the way through. 

I call this particular intervention the “stories we write together,” even though I do most of the writing and all the reader has to do is fill in a word or two here and there.  The idea is to write a story for your reader about a topic that interests him or her.  Hope that it is a topic for which there are photos or clip art on the web, because you need to illustrate it. 

Every few sentences, leave a word blank.  When your reader comes to that blank space, he will be asked to fill it in with a word.  You can write it, or the student can write it. 

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.

TIP:  I’m sure you could use stories that already exist – just retype them onto a text document, add illustrations, and insert your own blanks where you think the student will be able to add meaningful words or phrases.  Not all of us love making up stories at the drop of a hat. 

If you do decide to write your own, don’t worry about the quality.  For God’s sake, don’t sweat about character development or setting; the point is to create a narrative that intrigues the child, and believe me, children don’t get wound up over glitches or parts that don’t make as much sense as they could if we spent hours writing the plot.

Here’s an example: “Teddy Meets The Incredible Hulk”.  My original had cool illustrations (Google Image is a teacher’s best friend), and you can easily add them to any such stories you write.

You should enjoy this as much as the reader with autism!

Related posts:

1. The problem of the read-aloud
2. Irresistible reading: Stories starring our kids as characters
3. Reader with autism and figurative language, part 1

I’ve got a new student with autism.  He’s a fourth grader, and he moved here from another state last year.  The IEP he came with was quite specific about his mechanical reading skills (working on long and short vowels, etc) and reported minimal progress toward decoding and phonemic awareness over the previous year. 

He spent the second half of last year in our lower-grades Special Day Class, and now he’s with me.  I took a look at his IEPs for the past several years, and I must say I’m disappointed. 

Allow me to step up to my soap box for a bit and voice some concerns about the IEP process and how we think about our readers with autism.

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: I want to know about whether the child

• enjoys being read to,
• enjoys looking at books,
• comprehension levels,
• questions the child might ask,
• topics of interest,
• favorite characters in books, and
• genres. 

A reader is not simply a person who can read words; a reader is a person who has expectations of text, has preferences in text, and has experience in text.

A kid who cannot decode long “O” and “I” sounds can still delight in having Captain Underpants read to him.  A kid who cannot focus on the written word for more than 15 seconds at a whack can bring me a copy of The Indian in the Cupboard  and ask me to read it to him over and over and over.  A child who doesn’t know that a book starts on the left side and not the right can squeal with delight when we read Frog and Toad books.

We need to know as much about what a child can do as what he cannot do.  Yet.

When we are working with a child on comprehension in reading, we build on the skills that exist now.  I cannot devise a plan of action unless I know what the child already knows, and what he almost knows.

Think about it:  how much does knowing that I cannot use an electric screwdriver without stripping screws, cannot thread the needle on a sewing machine, cannot keep track of socks, and often fail to keep plastic containers together with their lids really tell you about what it would be like to come to my house for dinner?  Not much, I expect.

Note toParents:

Parents are part of the IEP team, and if the case manager doesn’t include the skills your child already has, you have not only the right but the obligation to make sure it’s added.  It’s as simple as asking whether the case manager could please add a list of the reading/math/writing/whatever skills the child does have to the description of “present levels.”  If your child is present at the IEP, ask him or her to contribute a list of strengths. 

I’ve had it up to here with IEPs that do not accurately describe a child, or which leave enormous blanks in the picture of the child I am teaching.    We’re talking about a person, not a skill-set, and not a file in a drawer.   Anyone who participates in an IEP meeting must consider how the child is portrayed, and if it is as complete a portrayal as possible in the document.  If you are unsure, consider whether, if the subject of the IEP was you, people would be able to see you as you are.

Related posts:

1. The problem of the read-aloud
2. Role of the classroom aide: To help the child toward independence
3. Don’t stop advocating for the child with autism!

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

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