Teaching reading to autistic child with cognitive challenges

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Hello everyone,

I'm looking to connect with some other parents who have an autistic child with cognitive challenges in kindergarten or early primary school who is learning reading readiness skills/to read.

My son is 6 and goes to a regular primary school that has special classes for autistic kids, both high-functioning and moderate functioning (with clear cognitive deficits). My son is definitely not in the high-functioning category. He hasn't been diagnosed with a cognitive deficit yet because he has not had the evaluation yet. He’s somewhat verbal (does ask for things and shares comments/ask questions on rare occasions) but the vast majority of his talking is echolalia (verbal stimming). He is extremely passive and has never been interested in books (impossible to sit with him and read a book) and never plays with toys (unless forced to by well-meaning therapists/teachers).

This year my son is in kindergarten, with the same team of teachers that had him for pre-K last year. All seemed to be going well, and then a few weeks ago the teacher started telling me that she had been trying to teach him to name A, B, C and D with absolutely no success for OVER A YEAR. Can you imagine that she didn't think to mention this to me before just recently????? When she told me this she prefaced it with a glowing report of his developing social skills (taking part in cooking activities with the group, etc.) and I think the implication was that I should get used to the fact that my child would never be able to make any progress in the academic areas.

Luckily, I decided not to take it on faith. I went out and bought some magnetic letters and few other materials and set about trying to teach him the alphabet using a topic he is extremely interested in: the names of the subway stations in Montreal, where we live (he adores riding the buses and subways). Low and behold, I taught him MORE THAN HALF THE ALPHABET IN ONE WEEKEND.

I think what happened is that she had very low expectations of him, and he has a very severe attention deficit and very low motivation (and she was not using good edible reinforcers) so he basically fooled her into thinking he was totally incapable in order to get out of doing something hard. When I started teaching him the first thing he did was have one of his crazy laughing fits (one of his avoidance tactics . Of course I didn’t let him get away with it. Then I noticed that he was not looking at the letters I was trying to teach him, so I forced him to look at them by putting his head in the crook of my arm and standing behind him (the letters were on the fridge, which he was standing in front of). Once he realized that I was actually going to make him do it, he made great progress—and now he is sight reading the names of the metro stations!

Now of course the school year is almost over. I just had my last meeting with the teacher and although he will be going into a first-grade group next year, his program in math, reading and writing will be the kindergarten program (so yeah, basically he flunked kindergarten despite being there for two years!).

So, now I've decided to teach him all the reading readiness skills over the summer, and consolidate them to the point that he will at least be able to start an adapted 1st grade reading program. He already has the capital letters down, so that means I will have to teach him: the small letters, alphabetical order (unless I can convince the school that knowing alphabetical order is not necessary for him to start a reading program) and a good number of high-interest sight words that he can combine into short sentences.

I already have the materials for this, along with two books that describe a strength-based approach that was developed for children with Down's syndrome and has been adapted for use with autistic kids who have cognitive challenges. I started to write our progress down in a blog to help keep myself on track, but what I would really like is to connect with some other parents who are trying to do the same thing so that we could share information and moral support.

So, if anyone on here is in a similar situation (teaching an autistic child with cognitive delay/deficits reading readiness or beginning reading, or supporting the school in this effort) please respond on this thread!

Have you considered homeschooling? It sounds like you're basically homeschooling him even though he goes to school.

I think you're doing a great job. You're kind of ticking off all the things about how to teach an autistic kid well - persistence, flexibility, using their interests, keeping them focused, etc. Plus, a lot of people tend to forget that autistics have skill scatter and judge all their abilities by their speech skills (which are easiest to observe).

You might want to check out the group Aut2BHome. They're a mailing list for homeschoolers of autistic kids. Even if you continue 'afterschooling' instead of homeschooling, you'll probably find they have a lot of good advice for teaching academic skills to autistic kids.

Sounds like you should be writing the book on it. =)

Good point. In some ways, the OP reminds me of the author of the book A Kid Like Me (although he had a son with ADHD and dyslexia, instead of a medium-functioning autistic kid).

Maybe he always knew it, but just had difficulty articulating it? Maybe he laughed because he thought you knew he already knew it as well? I'm assuming this is a low-functioning level here...

What materials are you using and where is your blog?

My DS7 has much milder ASD and ADHD than yours. He doesn't have cognitive deficits, but has about a 2 year delay in fine motor skills and may have some minor auditory processing issues. He was unable to learn to read and write in a general ed setting because he wouldn't join the small group when the teacher taught reading, and couldn't pay attention when she did large group instruction. The school proposed to put him in a special day class where the teacher was going to use a program targeted toward Downs Syndrome kids that did not use phonics -- it only aimed to teach 150 words by whole-word recognition. We refused, and are paying privately for a non-public school for AS kids where the instruction is 1:1. We've also been working with him at home, and he's finally making progress, able to sound out CVC words and read short EZ reader type books.

Here are some of the materials we found useful:
Handwriting Without Tears -- we've done the pre-K, Kindergarten, and 1st grade books. The wet-dry-try method on their chalkboard is particularly good when first learning the capital letters.

iPad app -- Letter School. You can set it to Handwriting Without Tears style, and it has great animations and practice for learning how to write the numbers and letters in both upper and lower case. My NT 3 yo loves it.

His teacher is using the Seeing Stars program from Lindamood Bell, and I really like the worksheets used for sight words. There are 5 sentences to read with the words, then the child traces the word with a pencil, then writes it with a finger, then writes it once independently, then composes his own sentence. I believe this program focuses initially on getting really good at recognizing letters, then on blending them, and also on the sight words (which they call "star" words.) I recently met a woman with a minimally-verbal ASD son and a daughter with Downs Syndrome, and she said the Lindamood Bell Visualizing and Verbalizing program was what finally taught both of her kids to read in high school.

Progressive Phonics -- this is a free series of books at www.progressivephonics.com. It starts with the alphabet, then words with short vowels, then blends, etc. The stories are very simple and funny, just one page each, visually uncluttered with a single simple cartoon on each page, usually about 7-10 lines long, and are written for the parent and child to read together (the parent reads the black words and the child reads the red ones.) Each book has about 20-30 stories. The first series covers the alphabet. We started with the second, which starts with "short a". Sight words are incorporated into the stories a little at a time.

Reading Eggs (www.readingeggs.com) -- this is a really engaging computer phonics program, 120 phonics lessons with 10-12 activities each. I would recommend sitting with the child while they do it -- I just let my son do it on his own, and he tended to just randomly click to hear the sounds and get through to the next one. It became much more effective once I began sitting with him.

Books by Margaret Hillert -- I had a lot of difficulty finding easy books that were at just the right level for DS. Even most of the EZ readers were too hard or too long. The Margaret Hillert books are limited to 50-75 sight and simple words, and are shorter than most of the other books.