Reading comprehension ASD son

[Sparkle41]

DS in Y1, almost 6 has ASD and delayed & disordered language. His understanding of language, answering questions is severely limited. Despite this he is doing well at MS with 1:1 help. He picked up phonics and decoding words easily and loves reading and has progressed to Orange level with ORT. However, his comprehension is now lagging. Does anyone have any advice on helping comprehension other than going back to very basic books or indeed any resources/books/reading schemes. I am keen for him to continue to be exposed to new vocab to help his language progression.

We have a similar situation. We ask lots of questions/explain when reading books to help with understanding. Also, we see it as two things - reading for fluency and reading for comprehension. So we did step back on books for comprehension to easier books but at the same time maintaining the harder books for the reading fluency. Also when reading stories together we ask questions and chat about them. Sorry I know you asked for ideas without stepping back a bit!

Thanks @Sausagepickle123 thats pretty much what we are doing too. Part of our problem is the school have “alternative” books to help with comprehension but they are very dated and DS not that interested. I’d love to find simple stories about real life situations/emotions with good clear pictures. DS does live Biff & Chip but he is running out of books at his level and below. Is your DC making good progress?

Yes my DC is making good progress. He has full time 1:1 at school which helps!
We sometimes go to the local library and get books out (ours has loads of readers), school have a subscription to “bug club” which we have access to (lots of questions on that to help comprehension), Topsy and Tim books have been a massive hit at times too (lots of scenarios you can discuss). Also just reading stories together (eg last night gruffalo a child and discussing scared etc). The SLT gave us and school some resources for emotions and inferencing to work on.

Have you tried an app called Reading Eggs? It has an online library with built in comprehension questions. It’s also has staged reading plans for teaching children how to read and how to understand what they’ve read.

It was brilliant for my DS (now 8, probably ASD) who always had a huge gap between his functional reading and fact comprehension, and his story comprehension which lagged at least 5 book band levels behind.

We also read books at a very basic level for comprehension (picture books from his younger siblings) and at a higher level for fun (his favourite being a thesaurus and an encyclopaedia about diggers at the same age as your DS is now).