Anything But Typical

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“The ABC’s of You: An Exploration of Letters and Language”

In this activity, students explore the communicative possibilities of various linguistic devices, taking Jason’s own language experimentation as their inspiration.

Jason is a prolific writer throughout Anything but Typical, exhibiting a unique relationship with words, language, and letters. The way Jason connects with letters helps the reader gain insight into the way he relates to the world at large. He gets lost in thought as he plays with words and their letters like a puzzle. When “his mind is focused on the words, it separates from his body, his body that almost becomes a burden, a weight” (Chapter 1). He also sees letters in an unusual way, sometimes even anthropomorphizing them: “Some of the letters look like they came from the same family, tall and thin, and their children, the lowercase letters, look exactly like they do” (Chapter 8).

In this exercise, you will play with words, letters, and language just as Jason does. Write a one-page letter to Jason, introducing yourself and telling him about the kinds of things you like to do in your free time, your favorite subjects in school—anything about yourself, really. In your letter, be sure to draw upon at least 2 of the following 5 linguistic devices:

• Anagrams. Rearrange the letters of words/phrases to form a new word
• Acronyms. Come up with new acronyms to define your experience
• Puns. These are words with double, usually humorous, meanings
• Alliteration. The recurrence of the same letter in a series of words
• Rhyming. The recurrence of the same sound in a series of words

In your letter, conclude by telling Jason one thing you learned about ASD that you did not know prior to reading Anything But Typical.

Teaching Suggestion: One of the book’s primary themes is self-acceptance, but the story also seeks to engender empathy for those with ASD. This exercise will help create a sense of understanding in students, showing them that those with ASD are not “broken”; they simply see the world differently. Taking this a step further, you may opt to review this list of 15 Successful People with Autism Who Have Inspired Millions of People, which explains how for many of these people—for example, Mozart and Satoshi Tajiri—their unique perspective is part of the reason they flourished.