cat,” the easier it will be for them to answer the upcoming question:
“Okay, now that we’ve colored the cat brown, what color should we color the table? Let’s look back at our story if we need a reminder.”
Proceed the same way with the table as you did with the cat, repeating the phrase “yellow table” as often as possible. Once the cat has been colored brown and the table has been colored yellow, have students put aside their two crayons and their pencils and refocus their attention on you. Again, if some students (as many of mine did) have trouble with writing utensils sitting idly on their desks, just have an aide temporarily remove temptation. It’s important that they stay focused through this next section, because the next step is important.
This next section of the lesson is spoken language. Before any of the answers are going to be written down on the worksheet, the questions are going to be read aloud—by you, the teacher—and answered by the students. Start by playing to your students’ strengths. If you know someone is going to have an easier time with a certain question, give him that question. Frustration is a huge problem for these kids, so allow them opportunities for success whenever and wherever you can. With that in mind, start with the first question, reading it aloud: “What color is the cat?”
Either ask a volunteer to answer or call on someone. If they can’t get the answer right, coach them through it, guiding them back to the visual cues in front of them. The important thing is to get the right words out into the classroom. The answers are also written directly into the text. There’s no need for conjecture here. Nothing even needs to be rephrased. The answer to the question “What color is the cat?” is directly embedded into the text, word for word, so those capable of reading can actually go back and read it. (This is true of all the questions on all the worksheets. They don’t need to be challenged yet with inferences, so they’re not. I’ve found that inferential and abstract thinking is tough for these kids.) Also, make sure they answer in complete sentences. This is crucial. So many times my students will just want to say, “brown” or “cat brown,” but that’s not enough. The answer must be “The cat is brown.” They can begin building their communication skills on this foundation.
Remember, no one is writing anything during this phase. This phase is purely verbal.
Once the questions are asked (and answered) in order, then skip around, asking the questions again in random order. Many students will simply memorize the answers in order. Skipping around FORCES them to pay attention. That’s the key to reading comprehension for students with autism. Forcing them to stop going by rote and to pay active attention to what’s on the page and what’s being asked of them. It also gives a student who may have struggled the first time around a chance to answer correctly, now that he’s heard the correct answer.
When the questions have been asked in order and at random, and the students have all (hopefully) had a chance to answer a question (or at least have heard the correct answers being spoken by a classmate) have them pick up their pencils and get ready to write down the answers on their worksheets. So we’re now moving from spoken language to written language, with the answers they’ve already processed. This transition is crucial—especially with simple-as-possible sentences—because it helps them to make the connection between spoken and written language, a connection they don’t always make. To them, much of the time, the words on the page are meaningless. Bolstering the connection between those words on the page and the words we speak to communicate with one another is central to these lessons.
Start with the first question, reading it aloud as before.
At this point, the kids have practiced answering these questions, so they should be okay. However, there will probably still be some confusion, so go with a student you’re certain can answer the question. It’s now less about assessing individual students and more about giving everyone a clear example of spoken language transitioning into written language. As soon as the right answer is spoken aloud, you write it on the board, allowing them to copy it onto their worksheets. You could use one of the extra worksheets to do this modeling, but I find it more effective to write on the board, where I can use larger, easier-to-see handwriting. Even with this, some students still won’t be able to copy the full sentence; that’s okay. If they write only the first letter, praise them for trying, and then maybe have that be the focus of an individualized lesson later on. Conversely, some students will be able to write the whole sentence independently, without looking at the board. This is more unusual, but in my experience, it became less so as we progressed through these worksheets.
Don’t forget—you’re always going to be dealing with a huge range of skill sets. That’s why these worksheets were so successful for me. Everyone was allowed to get SOMETHING from the experience. The kids in the middle of the pack (the majority) got the most.
The rest of the lesson is self-explanatory. You move through the remainder of the sentences in the same manner—read the question aloud, get the answer spoken aloud, and immediately transcribe that spoken answer into a written sentence, with the students following your model. When you get to the end of the sentences, you allow the kids to color the pizza (or whatever the food or extra item is on the worksheet you’re on) as a reward. This, like so many things, falls under one of the basic teacher tenets: if you make it seem like a reward, it becomes a reward.
Then give lavish praise, pass out stickers, and display the children’s work on the bulletin board.
You will do the whole thing again in two days. One worksheet, with its four variations, will take you a week and a day—Monday, Wednesday, Friday and the following Monday.
When you’ve finished the fourth variation of the first worksheet, you will do the first variation of the sentence-building exercises. This lesson will be implemented on the Wednesday after the fourth variation of the first worksheet. In other words, every fifth lesson will be a sentence-building exercise.
The sentence-building exercises concentrate on building your students’ observation skills and corralling those observations into conversation. Not unlike the worksheet lessons, that conversation is then transformed into written language. However, this time, that written language will be plugged into a successive pair of graphic organizers and, ultimately, into actual sentences. Each sentence-building exercise will have two variations, one to follow each of the two animal worksheets. The first cat worksheet, with its four variations, will be followed by the first variation of the first sentence-building exercise, also about a cat. The second cat worksheet, with its four variations, will then be followed by the second variation of the first sentence-building exercise.
The goal of each sentence-building exercise is to build three sentences describing the animal in the picture and to illustrate those three sentences. Like the worksheets, it’s about repeating the predictable lesson structure, so it’s familiar and the kids get comfortable. When students are comfortable, they are open to learning, but they also stay alert because the details within that predictable structure are always changing. I will take you through each detail of the lesson’s structure, with scripted suggestions for each lesson. The fullsized photographs of each animal and the two graphic organizers you’ll need for each sentence-building exercise are found at http://fhautism.com/arc.html.
Before you start teaching this lesson, you’re going to draw the two blank, graphic organizers on chart paper (I prefer chart paper to writing on the board because you can save the completed lesson charts for your records or for future IEP meetings). The first graphic organizer is a circle-in-circle chart, or a general-to-specific chart. It consists of one small circle inside a larger circle. This is what it should look like:
Get the free
