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Reading Help: WWYD?
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Our daughter is grade 1, just turned 7. She has ASD, very high functioning and smart, but reading is her weaker area. She can read/decode CVC words and many consonant blends – a sentence like “That cat is sitting on the flat mat” “The bug was in the hand bag”. But she still mixes up her short vowel sounds. One thing I suspect is that instead of decoding she is just memorizing the words as sight words. She is very visual and memorizes quickly. So my “guess” is she has memorized “bat” so then when she encounters “bet”, since it has the same shape, she reads it as bat, or bug as bag, dud as dad etc…
Now, once I stop, point it out to her what the vowel actually is and remind her “What does “a” say?” she will sound it out properly and continue, but this makes me wonder if she is really ready to progress to long vowel sounds? She also still needs very short lessons as reading overwhelms her and spikes her anxiety, especially when she encounters new material or has a lot of mistakes etc.
We’re currently using Alpha Phonics and she likes it okay, but I’m wondering – given that after 1.5 years of reading lessons she is still mixing up her vowel sounds should we:
A) try a different program that will offer more review or a different approach?
B) Perhaps stop learning new material for a little while and go back and review the vowels and simple CVC words?
C) Just keep moving forward and think it will come?
And how do I remedy her memorizing instead of decoding? I mean, I realize that after awhile we all read from memory (we’re not sitting there decoding each word in a book), but when doing so is still causing errors… Do I just let it go?
I’m happy to share what happened with my daughter. The situations may not be exactly the same, but it might give you some ideas to ponder in the mix.
As many of you know, my youngest is on the autism spectrum too and has many language struggles. I started teaching her just like I had taught all my other children, starting with short vowels. Well, we worked on short-vowel-A words for two years and it just didn’t click. The whole decoding or sounding-out technique just wasn’t working for her.
About that time I was studying more about how Charlotte had taught children to read using both sight words and word-building, so I decided to try some sight words. I wrote three words on index cards–words that corresponded to three locations in the room where we would do our lessons– and I tried to make them look very different from each other (chair, window, bed). I showed her those words and told her what they were, and we would play games like “go put this card in its place” or I would hide a toy in one of the three locations and show her the card with the word as a clue to where the toy was. She seemed to catch on quickly and started looking forward to those lesson times again. (We had both bogged down with the short-A stuff after so long.)
Then I started using Charlotte’s full methods and working our way through a poem, using the two-pronged approach of teaching the words first as sight words then coming back to do word-building and reinforce/review the phonics. Well, she took off! She was reading words I had never taught her. I don’t know how.
We worked our way through the Pathway readers in short, short lessons, so far up to New Friends, and I’ve thrown in other reading practice along the way too. That reading gives her a sense of progress and accomplishment, I think. Then we continue to do word building with any words that trip her up in her reading, or sometimes listening.
One other thought: I’ve talked with many moms whose neurologically-typical children struggle with CVC words that differ only in the middle vowel. It’s hard to spot that little difference between “cat” and “cot” right off. Now, seeing the difference between “cat” and “giraffe” is much easier. So, often it just takes time and practice reading to catch those small differences and intuitively know what to look for.
In short (though this is definitely not a short note!), I would encourage you to keep moving ahead and offering new ideas. Yes, sometimes it takes longer for a concept to click with our special kids, but it’s doubly hard when the motivation is lacking because we’ve been sitting in one place for so long.
Just some thoughts and one mom’s experience. Hope they help a bit.
I really like Sonya’s advice and thought I’d offer some encouragement.
My son is high functioning ASD and also had a lot of trouble learning to read. He was being taught to decode and just didn’t like it. He could do it, but he struggled, it was a chore, and reading wasn’t fun. He was 7.
Before he decided he hated reading and would never be any good at it we totally changed course. He took him out of public school to homeschool and did no reading or phonics programs at all the first year. I read books to him. Good ones. Fun ones. Sometimes I would ask him to help read story problems in math, or directions, or some other kind of reading that didn’t feel like “reading”.
Then we started having him read books again and I didn’t make him decode. If he didn’t know the word I told him what it was. He loved not sounding it out. When he was 8 he was diagnosed with ASD and things started making more sense. When I saw my younger son use context clues when he was learning to read I realized my older son never did that. Using context clues to figure out challenging words is huge, and he was totally missing out on that.
Just around his 9th birthday the switch flipped and he was finally reading “fluently”. Then he started reading for fun- without being made to. He was two grades behind in his reading level, but closed the gap in a year and a half.
At 11 he loves to read. Once we took him out of public school I never made him decode again. It wasn’t helping him and it was more important to me that he enjoy reading than how he learned to do it.
Time, patience, and positive affirmation will do the trick.
Good advice here. I will add that when my dd reads to me and doesn’t know a word, I model how to decode it and she says the word. If it’s a compound word or a word like today, I cover the day and sat “to” and then uncover day and say “day”. She doesn’t mind when I am doing the sounding out.
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