Reading comprehension

[Guest guest]

The Edmark series is a sight word approach to reading and I would not

recommend it except for the most involved kids or if you have a very

bright, very young child you might use Edmark to get a jump start on

sight word vocabulary. The level of reading comprehension addressed

through Edmark is the concrete level - not the type of reading comp our

kids tend to have problems with. ASD reading comp difficulties tend to

come from the issues with abstraction.

Often kids with autism have problems with reading comprehension because

of language and social related issues. If you go to the

www.wrightslaw.com site you will find articles on reading and links to

some excellent materials related to reading. Reading is decoding and

comprehension.

If you develop language skills that focus on problem solving, inference

and perspective taking then reading comprehension will also come along.

Reading comprehension is taught by reading simple passages or even

sentences and asking the who, what, when , where, how, and lastly, why

questions. However, if a child cannot answer these questions from

experiential situations, they most likely will not be able to answer

them after reading some text. So, these things need to be worked on.

At a higher level, many ASD kids have problems with reading comp because

they cannot perspective take, infer, or predict. For instance, the story

is about a cat looking at a mouse and smiling. The ASD kid might say the

cat is smiling because " he is happy " . The typical kid might infer the

cat is smiling because he is thinking about eating the mouse. See the

difference, and see how the autism spectrum issues kick in? The ASD kid

may entirely miss the story line because he is not applying knowledge of

the relationship between cats and mice and he is not able to think what

someone else might think. So, when they get to a level and study Nazi

Germany, they can tell you the Nazi's were bad, but can not understand

how the Nazi's impacted people's lives, how folks lived in fear, etc.

So, when they read they may only come away with the clearly stated facts

( dates, #'s, places) but miss the real issues - how the Nazi's impacted

people, and how people are still dealing with something that happened

over 50 years ago.

If you are into curriculums vs techniques you might want to look at the

Mood Bell Visualizing and Verbalizing materials. They claim to

have good success with ASD kids with reading comp issues.

You also might look at www.socialthinking.com for materials related to

teaching perspective taking, inference, problem solving, and

abstraction.

Good luck.

Ronnie

reading comprehension

HI,

What kind of material have you used for reading with comprehension.

Some one suggested edmark series. Has anybody used it.

thanks

Bharathi