Supporting Reading Comprehension and Theory of Mind Development: Primary Autism ISP

IWB Learning Community – Co-Teaching at White Haven P.S.:

There was no better way to spend Valentine’s Day than co-teaching with Ms. Tse’s primary ASD class at White Haven Public School!

Together, Jackalyn Tse and Itinerant Resource Teacher, Christina Mathura co-planned and co-taught an engaging lesson on reading comprehension. The abstract concept of understanding what was read, can be challenging for many students with diverse learning needs. For this lesson, Ms. Tse chose to use the familiar text of “The Three Little Pigs” as a spring board for comprehension and theory of mind development.

Theory of Mind

According to researchers Dodd, Ocampo and Kennedy (2011), when reading with young children with an ASD asking questions that are factual and/or sequence-based is commonly practiced, however, posing perspective-thinking/emotionally-aware questions serves to support theory of mind development, and overall results in the development of strong reading comprehension skills.

Lesson Examples

Students used Actions on the page to help support them in recording their thinking. Student choice was built in as students had the opportunity to choose how they would like to interact with the IWB.

With one simple touch - directly from the flipchart page, students could choose either the:

-     Sound Recorder
-     Pen
-     Highlighter
-     Eraser (if they made a mistake)

By having the Actions live on the page, students do not have to navigate to the Toolbox to access the tools needs, and prompts/suggestions of tools are made visual and concrete.

Here, one student chose to demonstrate his thinking using the Drag/Drop Actions of the Pen/Eraser tools:

Similarly, another student chose to demonstrate his thinking using a Current Selection Action - the Sound Recorder: