Year 1 parents/teachers - Advice

[Anna85]

Hello all,

My DS is in year 1 and has High Functioning Autism & ADHD

At the end of Reception we were told his EYFS score was 2.5 (average being 6). The school didn't seem bothered by this but as you can imagine I was and still am!

His reading is still not good at all and is still getting very muddled with certain letters and cannot link sounds. Also his handwriting isn't that brilliant!!

Has anyone got any suggestions how I can help at home? As you appreciate his concentration isn't brilliant but I really want whats best for him and achieve well!

Im a year 1 teacher.

I think at home - you should be concentrating on creating a love of learning. Read stories to him regularly, talk to him about things he sees.

For hand writing, you can do games which strengthen his hand muscles like playing with playdoh, picking up small objects with twisers, colouring in.

play sound games when your out an about like - say a word broken in to sounds eg t - r - ee -s and ask him to guess what word you are saying. Play eye spy - I spy with my little eye something beginning with t (say the sound not the letter).

Counting all the time - count the stars to bed, count out pasta for dinner, count out knives and forks when laying the table etc.

There are so many opportunites for learning without making him sit at a table with a book of sums!!!

Hope this is what you wanted!

First of all, the eyfs score thing sounds wrong. There are no half points and there's a range of things that children are scored on ( emotional , physical, numeracy) so an average of all isn't really helpful as most children aren't equally good in all areas. Is it possible that he's very high in some areas and low in others?

Just to compare- ds2 has a late August birthday. He scores something like 3 or 4 on writing because he can't form his letters correctly and 5-7 on the others so his writing mark would lower his average. Teachers have to see the child demonstrate the point without an adult prompting so if he's shy or his interests may mean the teacher has never seen him count or whatever so for eyfs purposes it's something he doesn't know.

Ds2 is apparently average in literacy ability and the same age as your ds. He gets mixed up with 6/9 b/d q/g and is very reluctant to write. His writing (like the others boys on his table at school) is immature compared to girls of the same age but hopefully he will start improving as he matures.
If you google, you can get a list of what each number in each category means.

Have you tried the SN board - there might be more ideas there.

Be aware you might have to use different methods to help your DS. Can he type? Could he (with you supervising) learn to type as well as write. We do this with DD as it helps her confidence.

I know one non-verbal boy (with ASD) who is now teaching himself to use an iPad and to type and read (much to the shock of those around him).

Also, DD cannot deal with phonics at all. She could write quite well then the teachers told her to write how the words sound and she takes this literally and does it all wrong. Now we say 'how does the word look when you read it' and she gets it right. She also learned to read by recognising whole words.