How to teach … autism awareness

To mark World Autism Awareness Day here are some lesson resources and teaching tips to help teachers support those directly affected and ensure all students understand the disorder.

 

  

Autism is a disability that affects how a person communicates and socially interacts. Since it has no physical signs, some students can find it hard to understand.

Autism affects millions of people around the world, including more than 700,000 in the UK, and early diagnosis and intervention are essential.

Ahead of World Autism Awareness Day on Wednesday 2 April, we have a collected a range of useful resources to help teachers ensure all students understand the disorder and help support those directly affected.

The autism spectrum disorder (ASD)-friendly classroom presentation by Humans Not Robots raises awareness of some of the needs and difficulties presented by students with autism. The presentation explains what ASD is and how it affects communication, social and thinking skills.

The guide stresses the need for an individualised approach when working with ASD students but includes some "catch-all" strategies such as starting lessons with short, fun and factual activities that provide immediate structure and awarding points for meeting pre-agreed targets. Suggested changes to the classroom environment include: reducing background noise, using natural lighting and avoiding "busy" displays or posters.

Also from Humans Not Robots is this strategy bank for students with ASD. Ideas include: following very clear classroom routines; supporting oral presentations with charts, diagrams and pictures; setting tasks with clear goals; and using short, simple instructions.

'Lost' Samuel Beckett Story 'Echo's Bones' sees the light after rejection in 1934

A previously unpublished short story by Samuel Beckett, rejected as a “nightmare” by his editor, will go on sale for the first time next month, 80 years after it was written.

'Echo’s Bones', a 13,500-word work, was commissioned as the final piece for his early collection More Pricks Than Kicks, but in 1934 was rejected by editor Charles Prentice, who said it gave him “the jim-jams”.

It features Belacqua Shuah, the protagonist of the collection of interrelated stories, returning from the grave, and remained hidden in archives since it was rejected.

In a blunt rejection letter to the young Beckett, published in the introduction of the new version, Prentice wrote: “It is a nightmare… It gives me the jim-jams… There are chunks with it I don’t connect with. I am so sorry to feel like this.”

The new volume, published by Faber & Faber on 17 April, features an introduction by Dr Mark Nixon, director of the Beckett International Foundation and a reader in modern literature at the University of Reading.

“On first reading, one cannot help sympathise with Prentice’s decision to reject the story,” he writes. “But if the story is rather wild and undisciplined it is also quite brilliantly so…

International Children's Book Day 2014

Each year a different national section of IBBY sponsors International Children's Book Day on April 2. In 2014, Ireland is the sponsor. Below is a letter from Ireland's Children's Laureate Siobhan Parkinson, to the children of the world:

Readers often ask writers how it is that they write their stories – where do the ideas come from? From my imagination, the writer answers. Ah, yes, readers might say. But where is your imagination, and what is it made of, and has everyone got one?

Well, says the writer, it is in my head, of course, and it is made of pictures and words and memories and traces of other stories and words and fragments of things and melodies and thoughts and faces and monsters and shapes and words and movements and words and waves and arabesques and landscapes and words and perfumes and feelings and colours and rhymes and little clicks and whooshes and tastes and bursts of energy and riddles and breezes and words. And it is all swirling around in there and singing and kaleidoscoping and floating and sitting and thinking and scratching its head.

Relaxing zero tolerance in schools could be Obama’s boldest civil rights reform

“Hope and change” may have driven the first presidential campaign for Barack Obama, but many educators and public education advocates have been discouraged by Obama’s education policy.

While the US secretary of education, Arne Duncan, often claims Obama addresses education reform as the civil rights issue of our time, that rhetoric has often been contradicted by policy.

However, the recent government initiative on discipline in schools could salvage the hope that education reform can turn in the direction of better equity for all students. Based on data from the US Department of Education on civil rights, the Obama administration is calling for an end to harsh discipline policies, such as zero tolerance, that “disproportionately affect minorities”.

This introduced policies such as discipline codes that mandate expulsion or suspension for first-time offences (such as bringing a knife to school).

Two trends with disturbing parallels began in the early 1980s during the Reagan presidency: the era of mass incarceration, labelled the New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and an era of public education reform that introduced high-stakes exams and accountability measures for schools and teachers.

Mass incarceration and school discipline patterns over the past three decades have disproportionately impacted African American men. African Americans are arrested and incarcerated for drug use at rates much higher than whites, even though African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates.

Dyslexic pupils not helped by reading method

Up to 400,000 dyslexic children may be hampered in learning to read by the Government’s insistence on the use of synthetic phonics to teach them, says a report to be published today.

A poll of more than 500 literacy teachers reveals that more than half (52 per cent) believe that the Government’s approach is either “ineffective” or “not very effective” in helping dyslexic pupils.

They believe that children with other disabilities and the most able pupils could also be held back. The poll, carried out by ReadingWise UK – designers of online literacy materials – casts doubt on the Government’s favoured strategy for improving reading.

“Literacy support needs to be tailored to the learning pace, experience and needs of the individual child – delivered by teachers with the appropriate specialist training to identify those who might struggle,” said Dr Tilly Mortimore, senior lecturer at Bath Spa University’s School of Education.

“Neither children who are fluent readers, nor those at risk of Special Learning Difficulties/dyslexia or other reading disabilities are likely to find a ‘one size fits all’ intensive synthetic phonics programme helpful. Furthermore, the Government’s punitive testing regime risks undermining both teachers and learners.”

Black Death skeletons dug up during London Crossrail excavations

Skeletons unearthed during excavations for London’s Crossrail project are those of Black Death victims who were buried during the 14th and 15th Century pandemics, DNA analysis has revealed.
The skeletons of 13 men, three women and two children, along with seven other unidentifiable remains, were found under Charterhouse Square in Farringdon during excavation work for the £14.8 billion project.

It is thought that the area near the Barbican Centre, which was just outside the city boundary at the time, may be the location the location of the second emergency burial ground referenced in historical documents but until now it had never found.

Set up in the capital to cater for the masses of bodies, it means that thousands more could have been buried in a mass grave in the area. A 'community excavation project' is set to take place in July to try to determine the extent of the cemetery.

Carbon dating techniques on 10 of the skeletons conducted by scientists from Queen's University Belfast indicated three separate “phases” of burials - coinciding with known separate outbreaks of the plague in the capital.

Reading rehabilitates prisoners: it is not a privilege to be earned

Chris Grayling’s latest reform to the justice system has gone viral as news emerged he had banned prisoners from receiving books sent from outside. A blog piece penned by Frances Cook, of the Howard League, outlined some of the items that prisoners were now to be prohibited from receiving, including underwear (meaning shared pants, worn for months on end) and home-made gifts (making a personalised birthday card from a child into illicit contraband).

The item that most captured popular attention was the banning of the books. This has produced a very strong reaction from writers and novelists. Mark Haddon, award winning author of The Strange Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, has described it as malign and pointless extra punishment. And other authors such as Philip Pullman, as well as academics including Mary Beard have given their support to a growing campaign urging the Ministry of Justice to review the decision. There is now also an official petition.

It is important to stress that Grayling has not banned books. The measure means that the right to books will become part of the “incentives and earned privileges scheme”. Extra books are allowed if bought with money earned from good behaviour – but this only occurs when the prisons deem inmates worthy and, even then, they can only be purchased from a specific (government-approved) catalogue.

Why testing four-year-olds as they start school is a bad idea

The coalition government is to introduce the testing of young children soon after they enter primary school at the age of four or five.

English children are already tested far more than children in most other countries and if our four and five year olds are tested, they will be amongst the very youngest children in the world to undergo a formal assessment of their abilities and achievements.

Some people think this testing is long overdue; many others think that it is not only a waste of time but it is very damaging to young children’s confidence at a time when they are having to adjust to new surroundings and new ways of learning. Is the testing then a welcome development or a harmful activity?

The government believes that testing is necessary to find out where children are at the beginning of their formal education so that their progress can then be mapped out and eventually assessed at age 11 and later at age 16.

The tests are supposed to measure not only the children’s progress, but also how good the schools are that they attend. Children will be given a baseline test when they start reception, and are expected to have achieved a new standard by the end of primary school. It all sounds very sensible and straightforward. But is it?

Famous paintings help study the Earth’s past atmosphere

A team of Greek and German researchers has shown that the colours of sunsets painted by famous artists can be used to estimate pollution levels in the Earth’s past atmosphere.


In particular, the paintings reveal that ash and gas released during major volcanic eruptions scatter the different colours of sunlight, making sunsets appear more red.

When the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted in 1815, painters in Europe could see the colours of the sky changing. The volcanic ash and gas spewed into the atmosphere travelled the world and, as these aerosol particles scattered sunlight, they produced bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for up to three years after the eruption. J. M. W. Turner was one of the artists who painted the stunning sunsets during that time. Now, scientists are using his, and other great masters’, paintings to retrieve information on the composition of the past atmosphere.


“Nature speaks to the hearts and souls of great artists,” says lead-author Christos Zerefos, a professor of atmospheric physics at the Academy of Athens in Greece. “But we have found that, when colouring sunsets, it is the way their brains perceive greens and reds that contains important environmental information.”

What makes Chinese maths lessons so good?

Chinese students begin learning their maths facts at a very early age: maths textbooks begin with multiplication in the first semester of second grade, when children are seven years old. In order to understand multiplication, pupils have to memorise the multiplication rhyme: “four times eight is 32, five times eight is 40” and so on, which was invented by ancient Chinese scholars 2,200 years ago.

Stemming from this tradition, most classrooms have few concrete teaching materials for maths lessons. The cultural traditions of Chinese maths education lead people to believe that routine practice is the most efficient way to learn.

This continues today. And as a result, schools in Shanghai have scored highly in recent years on international tests of maths ability. It is this aptitude for maths among Chinese schoolchildren that has led the UK government to announce plans to bring over 60 maths teachers from Shanghai to help teach in centres of excellence.