The next strategy I’d really like to address is summarizing, because we know summarizing is kind of the gold star of knowing that you comprehended something. You took something you read and you put it in your own words. That means I have to choose what’s important in that article. I have to choose what supports those arguments in that article and what really doesn’t belong in that article.
When I’m first starting, I try to make the differences really very wide. I might take a short story and clip them — the sentences — and then put a few sentences of their narrowed and restricted interest such as Star Wars, Chewbacca, something like that in there. And I have three boxes. One says, “main, important facts of the story.” One says, “supporting details.” And one says, “unimportant.” So I’m going to have them sort which ones of those stories are there. So they start to develop that pathway and that organization of their brain that as they’re reading, “Oh no, I don’t need that.”
That also follows over in math kinds of word problems — where people may put excessive sentences in a word problem, and even though Bobby has 17 cents I don’t need that Bobby has 17 cents in that word problem.
These kinds of reading comprehension issues not only impact their reading scores but also impact their math scores, because typically children with autism do very well on the computation end of things — but the minute the language starts coming in it’s a problem, because you have to use those little words, all together, you know, things that are not visually seen.