teaching a non-verbal child to 'read'

[MommyUpNorth]

Has anyone done it, and if so, how did you go about it? DS is going to start P1 (Scotland) in August, and the teacher has offered us the 1st 6 ORT (Biff, Kipper, etc...) books to have a look at over the summer. I've offered to adapt stories if necessary & make games (matching pictures) for ds to use with each book.

Obviously by the title, ds is non-verbal... but the class will do their phonics & then sight words & ds will join in in his own way. How do other kids start down the path to reading?

I should also mention that ds has SLD as well, so I was going to do very simple picture books, with simple text underneath like DS is eating, DS is at the park... that sort of thing. He would then have to sign the story to us.

At the minute he signs along to familiar books and picks out things on the pages which interest him, but how do you reverse the process so that he would sort of initiate the 'reading' back to us?

There is probably some really obvious process here that I'm totally missing! SLT doesn't really know what to do, and his IEP target for the last year or so has been to produce the m, p & b sounds... but we're not there yet at all, so speech is a loooooong way off!

dd is non-verbal and cannot read as she is also visually impaired but she learnt to spell through listening and through the school being bloody good. We do have a very specialised SLT though.
She does spell words phonetically still. I have no idea if that will change.

Thank you so much OP for posting this. My non-verbal DD starts school next year and this is one of the things I've been wondering about. Will be v interested to see what replies you get.

zzzzz's link

zzzzz you just need 2 sets of square brackets, not 1 !

zzzzz the puzzle looks really good! We're melissa & doug fans, so funnily enough it's already on his wishlist. :)

I do like the idea of picking out the right letter from a set of 2 or 3 and then progressing. That sounds very manageable! ... and then the little box. He's quite slow, so that will be a long term target, but the idea is great!

Thank you!

Yes, that sounds like a really good idea! Ds will be won over by finding something in the box after each go, so I think this will probably work well.

I probably should have asked on here ages ago rather than wasting this year. Been thinking about just picking the right letter to go with the sound and it sounds so completely obvious as a next step, yet no one thought of it!

I think our SLT is trying to promote actual speech rather than making the earlier connections with these phonics sounds. She's come up with more and more ways of doing them at each meeting & we continue to fail term after term.

BTW, as much as I would love for ds to talk, he does have a syndrome which doesn't include a lot of talkers... so we're happy with whatever next steps come our way! I don't want anyone to think we're against speaking! :)

I taught my (then) non verbal boy to read, using a section of the Jolly Phonics DVD called Saying the Letter Sounds. I would pause them and get him to say each letter as it appeared on screen. To this day, he is very very good on phonics because of that lovely section! I think you can buy that DVD on Amazon for £25. It took months, but only doing 5 or 10 mins a day, and I used a lot of rewards so he came to associate reading with good fun.

Just a thought, but might be worth having a look at some of the resources used with Deaf kids who are signers? Maybe asking the local TOD (hearing impairment teachers) or having a look at forest books, they do lots of simple books with words and signs. Or even signed stories on line (on the ITV website)

Does he use PEC'S at all for communication? I found that dd2 learnt to read from her PEC'S cards (as most had writting on as well as the picture), she then started to comunacate using sentance strips (putting the words together), she was very young at the time (3 ish), at the age of 4 her speach begain to develop and her reading skills started to show, as her memory is good she memorises words (rather than using phonics), she's now 6 and can read very well even though her speach is still way behind. She's now ahead of her class mates but has skipped the phonics stage (although the school are still trying to push it onto her). Phonics is not always the best way to go with children who are not very verbal. Dd2 now reads Biff and Kipper books at school but started on forest books and a few others.

I would reccomend matching simple words with pictures (Ball, cat, dog, hat etc....) to begin with.

At the last MAKATON course I was on they showed a video of a set of NV twins learning to read using MAKATON symbols. It was really clever. They learned the symbols and then the staff matched each written word to a symbol and eventually they took away the symbol and hey presto they knew the word.

I know it wouldn't be as simple as that but it certainly seemed to work in theory.

Both my Dd who are on the spectrum learned to read by reading the whole word and not by phonics. They both rely on memory.

He doesn't use PECS. They introduced a sentence strip at snack time which he is able to use as he knows what he wants off the pictures. They use Boardmaker cards with the picture & word for the sentence strip.

Day to day we all use Makaton supported by visuals (boardmaker). They always have the word under the pictures. We've tried matching familiar words like family names, but he didn't seem to be making the connection... so I thought zzzzz's idea of just matching the letter sound to the letter might be a step back & easier for him.

He is starting to understand more language as very frequent words he can sign to us just by hearing them (without us signing), so perhaps the ability to decode spoken language is there... but then trying to turn that skill into something we can work with for reading seems to be much trickier!

I'll have a look at the forest books for early reading, and the phonics dvd, and then we'll try some different things over the summer break... hopefully something will show some promise.

Ineedalife that was exactly my plan over the summer, though I was going to do it with real pics &/or boardmaker pics that he is already using.

But I think I'm maybe getting ahead of myself and he's either not ready for it just yet... or this is going to take a very long time!

We're working on familiar words with DS2. He's not much into picture cards for PECS etc, but for things he does actually acknowledge, we add words to the cards. Phonics are obviously nonsensical to a nonverbal child, unless they happen to have receptive and expressive speech completely at odds, which DS2 doesn't really have.

One of the things I picked up from reading "When Babies Read" (DS1 was hyperlexic) was the suggestion to label all familiar objects with post-it notes. Yeah, that helped, when they ended up first piles in a corner and then shredded into myriad tiny pieces :o

Marion Blank has a programme for teaching non-verbal kids with autism to read. It works, but ds1 refused to do it. By 'it works', I mean he was capable of doing it (which isn't true of any other reading programme I have come across as as all use too much language), he just refused.

I'm hoping she'll produce a computer version as that might work for ds1.

The other way to do it is to sight match words and pictures. Ds1 can do this for quite a few words now.

Just to add on why phonics don't always help non verbal kids - kids with ASD especially don't always hear the whole word and are often particularly prone to not being able to process consonants.

I'll have a hunt tomorrow, when I'm more sober and less tired.

Loots of info googling auditory discrimination, btw. Lots, even!

Aha! Have to hijack, consonant recognition eureka moment!

Explains 8 years of apparently random incidents where mother bangs head on wall crying 'but why suddenly, can't you understand' quite simple words/phrases. Thank you