Learning to read child with ASD

[chuckeyegg]

DS reading has suddenly really taken off and he is delighted at his new skill and I am amazed. He seems to remember the words as a whole and doesn't seem to understand blending the letters as taught in phonics. He is getting upset at school having todo phonics.

Can anyone advise me how reading is generally learnt. Once I have told him the word he seems to remember it. How should I best help him.

DS doesn't have ASD, but other learning difficulty, and he has taken to phonics really well, however he never souded out sounds, he just looks at the word, reads it slowly, and figures out what it is. We did flash cards for him for many simple 'high frequency' words such as The, They, Were, Said, One, etc, and he can read much faster than his brother at that age as he recognises many common words quickly. However, phonics is really important as it helps them to 'decode' more complicated and longer words that they don't know. They can always figure out the word if they know and understand phonics. Maybe you could explain it as 'friendly letters' and join some letters together, such as 'er', 'ar', etc so he can quickly recognise sounds within a word. Does that make sense? If you skip phonics all together, he might struggle to read longer, more complicated words that he has never seen before.

dd1 knows all her phonics, and has done for years now (she knew them at 3/4, and is nearly 8).

she still has huge trouble blending and decoding - it is getting better, and slowly improving, but she reads (at about reception level, can manage ORT level 3/4) mostly by learning the words.

we do carry on with the phonics, though, as it will (hopefully) eventually help her to carry on reading at a higher level - obviously currently she is stuck if she doesn't 'know' a word.

dd1 does tend ot learn thigns out of order, though - she likes to be able to do the higher order skill (and needs to be able ot do it, in order to sustain interest), and then is good at working at filling in the blanks (eg, she has jumped ot reading by whole word recognition, and is now putting in the work to fill in the steps she needs to be able to decode fluently)

the hardest thing I have found is getting enough different resources of the right level, as once she has read a book through once, she has it memorised perfectly, so cannot 'test' her blending/decoding skills at all. found the OPen University My story app fantastic for this (if you have an ipod/ipad!) as could make her new picture books every day, and check her reading/recognition, rather than her memory...

Ds1 was great to begin with using phonics but then when tricky words where introduced the whole system annoyed him. He then learnt whole words and went very quickly up the reading stages. He likes rules, very black and white he found phonics very contradictory.

My Ds (5) is just the same - he does phonics and can sing the songs but he doesnt apply it to his reading. He reads by remembering the words, the same as he does with the high-frequency words he brings home.

Our brains tend to default to the way we find easiest so children who find it easy to learn whole words will tend to rely on that. Its what we all do with words we know already. DS does this and was being sent home with more and more complicated books even though his level of comprehension is about age 3 they were sending home books aimed at age 6.

We are trying to teach him blending / decoding as whole word learning may only get him so far. But thats mainly because we noticed he was sounding out the first letter (he has known the letter sounds since age 2), so we felt he could learn to sound out the rest of the letters - or at least taught this was what was expected. We have started with cvc words e.g. c-at, s-at etc He will now sound out each letter but doesn't realise he has to blend them. We are going to stick with it for a while, as my feeling is that we should try and teach him to decode if we can; but I accept that he may never choose to do it this way so its not something i am prepared to devote huge chunks of his learning time to.

What did surprise disappoint me was that the school didn't pick up either his lack of comprehension or that he was not blending. I had to go in and point it out, so at the moment I am doing the job school should be doing. The EP tells me this is not unusual that he spends more time telling schools not to send home inappropriate reading material than anything else. Schools are interested only if the child can read, not how they read. Its only when they move further up the school that the wheel comes off as some children will hit a plateau and as they cannot comprehend or decode get stuck.

There are lots of phonics programmes available for free online e.g. Starfall (a bit american). There are also specialist programmes like Headsprout which Moondog has recommended, but this is not cheap.

I agree with silver frog the hard thing is finding words they don't know already - we have to make up words to check blends. This is what the govt are planning to do with a new phonics test invent cvc words to see if children can blend rather than memorise words.

I think it has to be a personal decision if you do the phonics or not but I feel DS should always be given the chance to learn something and then only if he cannot learn in a particular way do we abandon it.

Thank you so much for your replies. It has given me a lot of advice and lots to think about.

:)

A lot of kids with ASD learn by whole words. That means they don't actually learn how to read, they only learn word - ie if you show them a word they've never seen before they won't be able to read it.

These kids typically have very good memories and generally cope OK with this strategy. However it's certainly not ideal. (And is often related to poor spelling)

My DS is 11 and can only read like this. No one besides me notices, but I think it will bite him more in secondary when he won't be able to learn new vocab through reading.

Oh and it means he won't read out loud - because half the words he reads he doesn't know how to pronounce.

DS did the sounding out like agnes's DS up until very recently. He knew the sounds from the age of two, but just could not put it together. We started teaching him whole word recognition with high frequency words about a year ago as this seemed the only word forward. However decoding and blending has suddenly started to click with him from about four months ago. He can confidently blend three letters new words without any problem, but has not figured out four letters words yet. May be it's our perseverance with decoding which has paid off, but he has recently made a huge progress with other things like maths (addition, subtraction), so it could just be a developmental stage. DS is nearly 7.

Thanks for your advise. DS does have a very good memory but probably best to try and encourage blending.

Thanks again x