Teaching non and pre-verbal kids to read?

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My daughter also screamed if it was a book she didn't like (usually with people). She was fickled when she was your son's age. All I did was identify what she liked around 5 ( turned out to be zoo animals). Nowadays I read only people orientated stories, she is listening to me read Harry Potter at the moment.

Maybee scan for subjects or topics he's into., You may be surprised at your son's response if you present a book with his pet interest.

[Climbing up on my dyslexia soapbox, sorry!]
After reading Reading in the Brain and Overcoming Dyslexia , the problem I see with pushing reading too early is that you have probably skipped over some important pre-reading skills -- like the ability to hear the individual parts of words ("cat" is made of "c-a-t"). About 20% of the population fails tests of this ability at age 5 and needs explicit instruction. If the child can't associate letters with sounds yet, or orally blend and segment yet, trying to learn to read is just an exercise in frustration for everyone. Without those skills, the child is learning to recognize words by shape in the right hemisphere of the brain rather than using specific areas in the left hemisphere to encode and decode individual phonemes. fMRI studies show that slow adult readers and dyslexic readers are using the former, longer path. I'm guessing that many early readers make the switch to the faster processing path on their own later, but I would worry that a non-trivial percentage do not and are being set up to be slow readers and bad spellers. (Perhaps for the truly visual autistic who thinks in pictures the right-hemisphere path is faster, but an ASD dx does not guarantee that a child is a visual thinker.)

It would be ideal if all reading programs started with a readiness check of phonemic awareness and whatever visual processing skills are need to recognize and remember letters and groups of letters (the latter was my son's issue). Then instead of a debate about whether the right age to begin reading is 3, 5, or 7, you would work on the skills each individual child is ready for. Then I vote for explicit, systematic, multi-sensory phonics instruction at the pace that works for the individual child. Let the kids who find it easy zoom ahead as fast as they can go, and make sure the ones who struggle master reading and spelling each pattern before moving on to new material. About 15% of kids in the current system never catch up to grade level, so just having reading groups clearly isn't enough individualization.

Thinking about it some more, doing phonemic awareness activities with a non-verbal or pre-verbal child would be challenging. I wonder whether sorting picture cards into rhyming groups or by beginning sounds would be completely incomprehensible. On the other hand, maybe it would be a different path of explicitly teaching that there is a link between sounds and objects. I'll have to ask my friend who is an early intervention speech therapist...

It might be interesting to learn about how deaf children are taught to read...

This makes sense. I hope I did not miscommunicate and imply I thought that the current reading group set-up is so great. What I meant to say was that given that they don't teach reading to the class as one big monolith now, and already have the scheduling infrastructure to personalize, that it would not be especially onerous to adapt the system they currently have to one that makes more sense developmentally.

You're right, in theory the reading groups are a good start, they just need to use them better. I also get frustrated with the meme in the homeschooling community of "just wait till they're ready", even if doesn't come until age 9 or 10 for some kids. I think a certain percentage of kids NEED explicit instruction in the pre-reading skills and there should be a limit to just waiting.

I did a quick google about teaching deaf kids to read, and it looks like the techniques presume a certain amount of language acquisition. Two of the main approaches seem to be teaching written English as a 2nd lanuguage (learning ASL-English correspondance), and focusing on morphology (the forms of words, like adding -ed converts a word to past tense.)

Yeah, I have issues with such a loose approach, as well. That is why I ask a lot of my homeschooling questions here, in addition to the homeschooling forum. Sometimes there really is an issue that requires remediation and you have to balance between trying too soon, and letting things slide too far. Keeping track of foundational skills is what I try to do also, to see where I am, which is not always so easy.

For non-verbal autistic kids, the link between language and objects is best made through pictures, not sounds.
There is picture of object, there is picture of word for object below it.
That's how others have successfully taught non-verbal autistic kids to read and how I learned to read.
Phonics is not autistic kids.
I know a few autistic kids who read early, but they were never taught explicitly how to put word together to communicate, so they can't do written or spoken communication as teenagers.
For some kids, it might happen automatically, but for others, it doesn't without extra teaching.

It varies, of course. Hyperlexic kids can often do very well with phonics as well as whole language.

On a different note, this conversation got me thinking. We always had to make our son focus on others' speech b/c his audio processing system preferred background noise and noise created by objects to noises made by humans. I wonder if kids who are non-verbal are also having a similar issue. If you also do not tune in speech, you may not process it well enough to imitate. I wonder if an audio book combined reading along with a physical book might be better for some. I know that it is not the same, and you don't get the added benefit of looking at a person's mouth when they talk to somewhat see how sounds are formed. of course, if you don't make eye to face contact, you can't see how people's mouths move when they say each syllable, anyway. I probably have not thought it all through, but maybe it is a thing to ponder.

Do you really think we're leaving him alone to naturally pick it up? I'm not that stupid. This kid works harder than I work- people are working with him all day long, including with me after everything else he did with other people (which turns out to be about 8 hours of work). He receives many different approaches of therapy, but ALL of them are working towards two main goals, which are (1) communication skills, and (2) independence. Like I said to you regarding my older son, I'm sure there are things we've done wrong or are doing wrong, or things we should have done that we didn't- obviously he is not a "success" by normal standards- however, I am doing my best, which is all I can do, and my best certainly does not include doing nothing.

My non-verbal son prefers listening through the audiotape instead of a person reading it. He only likes stuff drawn by Hergé (I know it's very strangely specific) so he likes to listen to Tin Tin audio books while looking at it, but he doesn't like any other books on audio tape (and we have loads). I've always wondered what's up with that (both the preference for the CD player and the artist, ) but he does hate people noise, so that could be part of it...hmm. I think it's also partly because he will listen with headphones so the headphones also block out all other noise, and I think that helps him actually hear it, whereas when I read or the sound is playing out of the speakers, everything else confounds what he's trying to hear (maybe?).

I report my own eggperience and what has worked for others I know to share with whole forum and any parents reading. Not much to do with you, so stop taking what I say personally, it's annoying. Obviously, the therapies have not worked for your son, as they didn't work for some kids I know, even though they learned to read as early as your son and had as many therapies has he did, suggesting that the traditional therapies don't work for some kids.

I know a lot of parents and kids from the nonprofit where I worked, and the ones who realize that the therapies don't work for their kids and are willing to put in lots of work themselves to help their kids at home, their kids are the ones who make progress from 10 or 15 when they start learning school subjects and not doing ST or ABA anymore.

The headphones would make audio processing easier. What you say makes sense to me.

That is interesting that he is so specific about only liking that particular artist. It is actually very cool that he can tell the difference between different illustrator styles. If you show him other illustrations he has done for other things would he spot them out of context? If so, that is a really amazing skill. He may have a real artistic eye.

Do think he also likes the stories and characters? He may have the receptive language down, and likes something else about the stories also. I wonder if he would do a silent movie style roleplay with you, or a puppet show or something with scanned artwork on a popsicle stick.

Audio + visual at the same time is probably too much crap coming in when a non-verbal, severely autistic kid is learning to read, so it's better to pick one modality, and the one that should for chosen for most of these kids is visual.

starfall.com has free sections where there are phonics videos, stories where each word is highlighted as it is read, and some stories where you click the word and it goes through each phoneme "c-a-t cat". Might be worth a try for a non-verbal kid who can operate a mouse. Not sure if they have an ipad app yet or not.

I know that there's a Starfall ABCs app - we have it and my kids love it! Not sure about other more advanced ones. I'll check it out - thanks for the tip!

It took me a while to understand the format of WP but it seems that people do respond to each other within other people's threads so I'm doing that here, my apologies if it annoys anyone.

I'm not sure if he can distinguish the art on its own, but with the books, he definitely does. Several people worked closely with Hergé on Tintin and two them have a very similar drawing style (one even draws Tintin in some of his comics) but my son doesn't like them- yet he does like other series by Hergé that do not feature Tintin. I think the initial and probably main attraction was/is the art, however I do think he follows the plot (perhaps not linguistically though), because when we watched the Tintin film, I showed him the scene in the book that was corresponding to the film, and he did continue to flip through finding them for a while (he's not into TV though, he moved on fairly quickly).

I like the puppet show idea- thanks!!