Tips on teaching my son to read?

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He's so frustrated and is starting to feel embarrassed because he's behind the other kids in his class.

BTW: Chaz is 6 and has HFA.

(I'm not a parent but if I were to hold a "real job" this is what it would be, helping kids with neurological differences learn to read.)

Do you feel comfortable saying more about his specific issues? Is he bad at following long verbal instructions and better at understanding concepts if they're drawn? If so this could be an issue of the parts of the brain that need to coordinate sounds with pictures (the symbols that are letters) not working in synchronization.

If it's something else I'd be interested to know his issues if you'd be willing to share so I can think about this and try to imagine a possible solution.

Read and show him the pictures to Doctor Suess!

Or any story, I loved hearing them acted out to me and the group in the elementary school library. Though stories like Stone soup I always found so silly.

Oddly, instead of making me more lazy to read because I could watch them instead, TV shows like Wishbone really made me want to read the story of its episodes. Reading Rainbow also, made reading seem like an enthusiastic option, though I watched that show more for the random science facts they throw in. Like visiting the peanut butter company to see how its made.

Last edited by Infoseeker on 04 Aug 2011, 1:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Obviously, what clicks with one kid may not with others, but here is what worked for us.

We love the Leap Frog products. They have videos that teach basic letter sounds and another that teaches beginning blends. My boys could read easy words very young because they loved those videos so much.

We also used the Hooked on Phonics program. This may appeal to your son or not. I know many people who say their kids hated it. My boys loved reading and were driving me crazy, but I needed something very organized because at the time my trips were babies and I didn't have a lot of time to research and plan. It has books and lesson plans, but it also had a CD ROM and reading games as well.

We also read tons of books to them and them to us. A guy my husband worked with gave us a ton of those older books like the Frog and Toad, Morris the Moose, Stanley,etc. His Mom once worked for a book company and had them in her attic. We were surprised at how many words the kids learned just from us reading one or two each night. We also had newer stories, but our kids like those more. They picked up some great words that way.

These days, I imagine there are all kinds of apps that help too.

His biggest troubles come from discouragement, I think. Both his sister and his brother are reading well above grade level, and he's very aware of this. I read with him daily but whenever I try to get him to work with me he breaks down completely and throws himself on the floor crying.
I've been persistent in having him try though. When he actually does work with me, he has a lot of trouble with letters that don't always make a concrete sound. Ex. "M" always makes the same sound, so he's got that but he gets completely confused with letters than can make hard or soft sounds, and with vowels (again, long or short vowel sound). I've noticed that he gets really confused because of differences in typography. For instance, a lower case "a" can look completely different depending on the book.
I've tried helping him memorize a list of sight words but he's only managed to get 3 or 4 of them. If we are reading a book and show him a word that is repeated over and over again, chances are only 50/50 that he'll know what the word is when I ask.

He does get special help in school and his IQ test scores show that he is of average intelligence. I just got his quarterly report from his special ed teacher, and she says that he is making some progress but that he is progressing much slower than expected.

Thoughts:

1. He would have much less, if any at all, trouble with a language with one-to-one morpheme:grapheme correspondence, where each letter represents only one sound. That doesn't help him with English but it might improve his confidence for him to know he'd be great at, say, Korean. Also Korean doesn't have widely used different font forms for alphabetical components as far as I know.

2. Since he is trying to learn English, though... well English is hard for this very reason, any non-native English learner can tell you that. The through/cough/rough example of all the sounds -ough can make is a good example. It seems like a concentration on learning basic rules of phonics is the only thing that would help in this case. I'm sure you've done that.

Patterns and logic are key though. So maybe you'll have to explicitly get into the linguistic meat of things, yeah with a 6-year-old, cause there ARE historical reasons why the letters make different sounds, though the ensuing complication is really frustrating.

For example: the different sounds "c" makes. If he sees a "c" his mind is immediately confused (I'm postulating here) cause he doesn't know if it's "ssss" or "k" or what. So "cap" could sound like sap, and how is he to know it's not? I guess start with the basic rule that words that start with a c make a k sound. of course there are exceptions but most short basic English words adhere to this rule.

Then you have words like "ice" and "certify". Well "ice" belongs to a set of exceptions because it ends in an e, which gives the c somebreath, prolongs it. The only way you can prolong a c is by saying it like sss. You could even demonstrate this for him, by habing him hiss like a snake and then tell him to stop hissing like a bigger snake had just come up and he had to be quiet to stay safe? And the result you get is a silent "k" sound, or a choked sound anyway.

Anyway, to resume what I was saying, tell him the e gives the c a voice, and a c with some breath in it is always an "sss". Certify on the other hand, or cerulean, is in another category of exceptions cause it is c followed by a sound that is not effortful to produce like the a in "cake" prthe a in "car" or the lea in "clean" are. lazy letters tend to stick together and if the c is followed by the easy-for-a-very-tired-person-to-say "e" in certify, the c before it is also easy to produce by a tired person, so it's "sss". Cake on the other hand is very hard to say if you're half-asleep and someone asks you what you want to eat. both the "k" and the "a" sound take a lot of mouth and throat movement. Maybe this way of looking at it will help your son?Maybe not?

Anyway so yeah I'm neither a linguistics nor phonics expert so take nothing as I said as actually correct or scientific but I'd suggest getting a book for yourself to read about the phonetic/written rules of English, maybe written for adult learners of English, and then try to explain the rules explained in the book to your son in a way he can understand him. The more logical patterns he knows the less he'll be bewildered. (Obviously.) I know you've probably tried everything but a phonics-based approach seems the way to go for a naturally ridiculously hard-to-learn language like English.

I used this book with Jordan and was very pleased with it. It uses simple games and fun activities to teach a child to sound out words to learn to read. Everything you need is in the book so you just copy a few pages to get the things you need as you go along and its all just playing games.

http://www.amazon.com/READING-REFLEX-FO ... d_sim_b_35Web Page Name

Hi, I have Aspergers, I had a very hard time learning to read as a kid. I was very stressed when people would try to teach me and I would just give up most of the time. My grandmother was able to help me by starting me on comic books. I loved reading "Sonic The Hedgehog" comics. Reading no longer became a task that people wanted me to do, but was instead something I wanted to do for fun. Another thing I experienced was a lot of frustration when learning to read. It is hard for me to explain, but the frustration was causing me to "shut-down" (the words of my family). I was unable to learn at all and had to take a break.

Another thought is maybe try teaching him ASL fingerspelling. The kinesthetic experience might help him remember words better, and you can tell him it'll help him if he ever tries to talk to a Deaf person. Or through a window!

Great ideas, everyone. Thanks so much!

These are great ideas. You can also check out my reading channel on YouTube. Just search for Reading and Grammar Channel, and it should pop up near the top. I am user vids4autistickids.

A lot of kids with autism, particularly with HFA and LFA, have comprehension problems--"hyperlexia," as discussed by the expert in the "favorites" section on my channel. They can learn to decode words or sound them out (really an easy process for most people), but they may not really know what the words mean or how to use them. For these kids, learning to read involves phonics, sight words, speech work, perhaps visual tracking work (the child may be skipping words or just looking at the pictures instead of reading word for word), etc. Also, always be sure to use pictures with the words that are being taught because visual learning--particularly through pictures--is often their strength. Use flashcards with both words and pictures on them, picture dictionaries, and very simple picture books made for new/emergent readers--one simple sentence per page, accompanied by a cute picture that goes with the sentence.

I personally taught my son with classic autism how to read and speak at the same time, and you can view some of the speech materials that I used on my speech channel on YouTube. Just search for Speech and Vocabulary Channel--it will probably be the first in the list. I am user vids4autkids3.

Simple answer: turn on the closed-captioning on the TV and leave it on. Turn down the sound slightly sometimes. Works like a charm (especially for all those weird homonyms, as long as the CC typist gets them that day)

Second suggestion: books with lots of contextual pictures. Graphic novels and comics are one sort, but the one that really got my son motivated to read was one of the Star Wars Visual Dictionaries, kind of a collection of schematics and such...he was really motivated to sound out the words, because at the time, I refused to read it to him. DK (Dorling Kindersley Readers) have books on many special interests kids might have, so exploiting that as a motivator is a third strategy.

Sorry if this sounds cheesy but 2 shows on PBS that we watch seem to have had a big impact on my DS learning to read. One is the Electric Company and the other is Word World. On the Electric Company they sing little jingles about those confusing letter sounds - like how C makes the soft sound when it comes before e, i or y etc. And Silent E is a Ninja. It makes the rules memorable. On Word World, all the characters are drawn so that the letters of the word they are make up their bodies. Like the sheep's body is made up of the letters s,h,e,e & p. The concrete treatment of letters and words seems to work really well for some kids.

Great suggestions. We use close captioning all of the time, and I always look for good pictures that tie closely to the text.

I recommend using a book meant for immigrants, like a TOEFL* study guide, to teach your son to read. Consider this: a native speaker learns a language by absorbing it, while an immigrant has to learn a language intellectually. Similarly, an NT learns social skills by absorbing them, while an aspie has to learn social skills intellectually. (Having a light bulb moment yet?) So, your son simply needs a resource that does not assume that the reader learns English by absorbing it from the world around him/her. And a book aimed at immigrants is perfect for that! After all, most immigrants come to the US at an older age, after they lose the ability to learn a language by absorption (around age 7), thus forcing them to learn English intellectually.
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* TOEFL [TOH-fuhl] stands for "Test Of English as a Foreign Language", and it's just that: a test meant to check an immigrant's proficiency in English. Basic knowledge of English is required for an immigrant to get citizenship. I know because my friend, who came from Belarus, had to take it when he was starting his first job in America (probably through some placement program).

I had a very easy time learning to read as a child and was always many grades above those of my "peers" in reading so perhaps I might not be of much help on the subject, but I learned to read in a very old fashioned, very structured way. My school taught phonics and we were taught all of the sound the vowels made, as well as about the silent e, and so on, in kindergarten. We were also taught that there were inconsistencies that would would just have to memorize.
We also had spelling tests.

We didn't start reading books until first grade though. The books we learned from were the Tom, Jane, and Spot books and the teacher would work with five our six kids at a time in reading them. We would each read various parts of the book and we would do this every day.

I suppose it was a rather dry way to learn but I had been very eager to learn how to read and I think I'm just neurologically well equipped in that area.

Your son might just not be so neurologically endowed in that area as an of shoot of language development issues in those with HFA, and he could have some form of dyslexia.

The only thing I can really suggest other than consulting with a specialist is, don't force him to do anything that is unpleasant and causes him to have an aversion to reading because then his mind will just shut off to it.