How To Teach Reading Comprehension To Autistic Students
Online resources include specific worksheets to help guide students thinking see above. 5 practical hands-on strategies for addressing reading comprehension issues that accompany Autism Spectrum Disorder ASD in children and teens.
Phonics and Letter Sounds Phonics instruction is an effective method to teach reading but its especially useful with children with autism because it breaks reading down into smaller easier-to-understand concepts similar to task analysis see our post Use Chaining and Task Analysis to Help Your Child with Autism.
How to teach reading comprehension to autistic students. Reading Eggs helps nonverbal children with autism learn to read and comprehend by encouraging them to interact with the reading lessons and e-books. If a student is a little shy and doesnt feel comfortable acting out the story you can always have them act it out on paper. In elementary classrooms with successful strategies to assess and teach students with autism how to better comprehend text.
This resource features an overview of why students on the spectrum may struggle with reading comprehension and a collection of strategies aimed at helping to improve reading skills and outcomes. Use Direct Instruction There is some early evidence that using direct instruction curricula such as Reading Mastery can be effective for students with autism to learn phonics-based reading. Create rules for decoding parts of words.
Children with Aspergers and autism find it difficult to understand abstract words like where when why and what. You can give them a character to play or you can just let them act it out as you read it. Capitalizing on their visual-spatial learning style by using multimedia teaching tools Breaking reading instruction into manageable chunks with plenty of breaks in between Teaching.
This is a new series of intervention resources entitled Development of Reading Comprehension in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The unit developed does two things. Use cues and prompts to remind students to utilize these rules while reading.
The students respond to the high level of structure and repetition that DI uses and many are able to make progress using it 1-1 if not in a group setting. The activities in the program teach them to recognize words paired with pictures and audio. This can be used to your advantage when teaching children how to read unknown words.
Student comprehension can also be boosted when the teacher helps the learner build. Some students with autism learn best through sound while others tend to be strong visual learners. Make a Visual Map.
To boost comprehension teachers can help students monitor their own understanding as they read. Act it Out Another way to help teach comprehension is to have the students act out parts of the story. There are so many different ways to develop reading comprehension skills in kids with autism and one of my favorites is to simply sit and read together.
Take advantage of this by playing audio-books in the car or on a home stereo or reading picture books that clearly show action and narrative progression. Through asking questions readers are able to form and test hypotheses to make inferences to summarize and coordinate the use of other comprehension strategies. Use short explanatory question and answer paragraphs to help children understand the function of these words.
Teaching reading to students with autism can be aided by the following strategies. One it educates teachers and students on a number of strategies to use in reading comprehension and two it helps students with autism gain important social skills. Tell Me About the Story.
Read together from an early age. Use Directed Reading-Thinking Activities DRTA This technique is a specific comprehension strategy for encouraging readers to ask questions make predictions and evaluate their predictions throughout the story. One strength of children with autism is their ability to follow rules and follow routines.
Follow the words with your fingers as you read ask your child to read or repeat words you know he or she is. Comprehension Strategies for Students with Autism Build background knowledge.
