When we’re teaching reading, because there’s such little time to talk about social communication as well as some of the comprehension issues and they dovetail together so well, it’s a perfect time to teach social communication along with teaching reading comprehension.
I try to choose texts that highlight those things that may be difficult for the child at that particular time and then — also add times for them to make predictions, time for them to make inferences, time for them to look at anaphoric reference, which is those nonspecific rules that sometimes they have difficulty with.
For instance, I had a young man who was just learning how to lie, and most children with autism don’t lie very well. And so whereas we’ve been lying since we were two or three and by the time we’re in adolescence we’re pretty good at it, they’re just kind of starting out.
This young man was using a scale that was addressing his own behavior, and being able to tell the teacher when he really just needed a break before he had a big blowup. So the scale was from one to five, and so four would be, you know, “I’m a little shaky,” and five would be, “Leave me alone, I just need to calm down.” Well, at first he was really excited about it, it was working really well.
As he learned to start lying he realized that if he said a four or a five, he could get out of work. And so we were kind of excited, because that meant — if you’re lying, that means I can fool your mind into thinking of something else. So that’s growth, that’s wonderful growth. However, his teachers were not so fond.
So I chose a parable, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, to show the effects of lying. And he learned how to kind of predict what was going to happen, but at the same time learned some social rules about the fact that if you lie all time people aren’t going to help you.
I try and choose those kinds of texts that will allow me to create many kinds of directions to hit both social communication goals and reading comprehension goals.
