[Duffy29]

Can someone put me on to a good evidence - based website with information about:

how children learn to read?

What is indicative of problems?

Comprehension vs ability to read (say) the word

Relevance of pictures in learning to read.

[firstatforty]

http://raisingchildren.net.au/articles/dev...ml/context/1217

http://kidshealth.org/parent/positive/all_...milestones.html

Hi Duffy - I haven't looked at these pages in depth but thought they might help you. I know my son's reading is behind due to his autism and verbal apraxia. His speechie has been helping him with his speech and literacy problems and has also given us activities to do at home. He's 5. If you have any questions about what we've doing please ask.

[Duffy29]

My feeling is that reading will help his speech - it's a visual cue (or prompt, I get confused between the two).

I spoke to his teacher, he is reading well at level 2, including comprehension and answering questions. I'm concerned that this is not far enough advanced for a child who is going into grade 1. Hence I want to educate myself up on the reading with comprehension.

I'd like to know what you are doing with your speechy. Ours has been targeting articulation at my insistence. His quality of the speech tap hat he had was so poor that it was only me that could understand him, and that put the pressure on by his dependence on me.

[baddmammajamma]

Slightly off course, my friend, but I think we ASD mammas have to be several steps ahead of the game.

If you haven't already done so, you might want to consider consulting a good educational psych -- one who has experiences working with kids with ASD -- to more accurately gauge your son's capabilities, get a better sense of learning style, and develop strategies that can be used at school & at home to support his learning.

I appreciate that some teachers and schools are hesitant to raise a red flag about potential learning disorders/issues when a child is just finishing their FYOS, but when you have a child with ASD, there's a decent chance that you are going to be dealing with -- at the very least -- learning "differences" throughout their schooling.

I've just seen one too many friends be told not to worry/it's too soon to be concerned when their children were struggling with reading or other foundational skills, only to later discover that there were other issues in play.

[Duffy29]

K, his ABA team consults at the school. I've just checked and his supervisor has her BA in psych, but the other supervisor who works with the older kids has a masters in educational and developmental psych. She also did his IQ assessment for school funding.

His teacher was very quick to give me detailed answers on his reading - it's clearly something she is watching closely and she seemed ok with the level 2 because of his comprehension and ability to answer questions about the text.

It's rather hard to have a conversation about a text with someone who can't speak well, even his speech path misunderstands words he says. But I don't want his (in)ability to talk to hold him back unnecessarily from developing the skill of reading.

So before raising the matter past the cursory 'what do you think of his reading'? I want to get myself better informed.

I was referred onto 'how to teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons' which uses direct instruction. This was by another psych friend of mine, who takes her evidence base very seriously. We are up to lesson 5 and it is more like speech therapy so far (in a good way).

[baddmammajamma]

Glad that you guys have such good support in the school!

Could you ask the supervisor (the one who is the edu/dev psych) to make some recommendations? I'd be happy to shoot a note out to my outside-of-EB contacts to see if anyone has concrete suggestions for resources.

[Lyra]

Please ignore me if I am off track here! If there are issues around speech could you give him some visual cues? For example: if I were about to read 1:1 with a child a book about pirates I would ask: What kinds of things might you find in a book about pirates? What do pirates wear/do/say? etc etc If he is having speech issues could you give him some pirate and non-pirate pictures and ask him which of these pictures might be in the book?

At the end of the book I might ask: what do you think might happen next? But you could give him a few options as pictures and ask which of these pictures might be next?

Obviously, level 2 books are not known for their great narrative arcs LOL but you might do better testing his comprehension with pictures rather than words. Sometimes as teachers we need to ask ourselves:What am I testing here? The ability to say the words correctly or the the comprehension?

[Duffy29]

Lyra, your brain works better than mine for ideas. His teacher is obviously focused on the comprehension, but I feel that because his speech is so poor he can comprehend more than we realise. And I want to develop both comprehension and the ability to say words properly. I knew a mum who's son had poor speech, but developed the ability to type his thoughts, then read them back. This worked better for him than trying to directly speak.

K, thanks, ask away. I will follow it up next year when school goes back, I just want to arm myself with a bit of info first.

Lyra, you must be a teacher. Where does level 2 sit for preps in vic?

[Lyra]

Yes, I am a teacher. But can't tell you where level 2 sits for Vic as I have been out of the classroom for awhile and am a bit rusty on all that. Also, I tend to teach upper grades. My previous school had a lot of ESL students so I well versed in a student's inability to properly get their message across

I like the idea of typing the words and getting him to read it back. The major downside with that is kids can be such slow typers. I would be more inclined to use cards with words on them that he can choose or a combination of picture and word cards ie if I wanted a student to write a narrative I would have some sentence starters, and then some boxes with pictures in. Do you want write a story about a dragon or about space? Each box would have words relevant to that topic and then I would have conjunctions, adjectives etc on other cards. Does that make sense?

Have you looked into cued articulation? That focuses on teaching each individual sound but can be a great boon to kids who are having trouble with forming words

[howdo]

Asking a child on level 2 to type would be extremely problematic. They generally don't have that skill yet, nor handwriting ability to that level.

I don't know where level 2 sits in vic specifically but IIRC others on EB have said level 5 is the vic benchmark for end of FYOS. Level 2 seems low for me, but if your child does have speech issues it could indeed be masking his ability to successfully express comprehension and thus move up the levels.

You are probably right in that he comprehends more than has been discovered thus far due to difficulty expressing it through speech. But if that is the case I would expect that measuring his comprehension would have been adjusted to take his speech into account.

This is a website that might help with comprehension teaching and practice ideas http://www.readwritethink.org/parent-afterschool-resources/