Will My Autistic Child Learn To Read

By Jane Caughey.

Any parent facing a diagnosis of autism for their child will agree that it is one of the most confronting and confusing experiences one could imagine.

In my case, on one hand, I still had a physically healthy, happy, funny, energetic little girl - but her future was suddenly shrouded in mystery. Would Emma ever talk? Could she ever be reliably toilet trained? Would she ever play and interact with her sisters? (Yes, on all accounts, as it turned out!)

And, of course, after the initial shock starts to subside, my thoughts turned to her educational future - will she ever be able to learn to read?

Fortunately, just before Emma started at the local wonderful specialist school, she had finally begun to speak single words. As the year went on, she gradually began to speak in short sentences. I noticed also that she was starting to show interest in reading the small books she had made at school. This amazed me as she had only just started talking.

During her kindergarten years, Emma had already started to recognise the letters of the alphabet and I knew that this was a crucial step in helping her learn to read. She had not yet started a home reading program at school (usually started in Term 4), so I decided to start exposing her to some basic Level 1 books - a set of readers I had bought from a reputable publisher. In addition to this, I found a set of high frequency words written on small laminated cards colour coded in levels of increasing difficulty that Emma’s older sister had used when she was in Prep.

Armed with these resources, I started to incorporate them into a regular feature of her night time routine – a session we called ‘book time’. I started each session by showing her the simplest 10 high frequency words (e.g. I, is, me, my etc.) Next, I would help her point to and try to read the words of a simple Level 1 reader whilst encouraging her to use the pictures as a clue to reading certain words. Finally, we would finish with me reading a simple picture book while (occasionally) pointing out high frequency words that were familiar to her.

This simple routine probably only took about 5-10 minutes. Some days were better than others (as is the norm with autistic kids!) but there was no doubt that this one-on-one session was going to be done every day without fail.

Incredibly after a while, it became apparent that she could read better than she could speak! In the 18 months since we started, she has read through all 8 sets of laminated high frequency words and I have had to make my own (using a ‘most used words’ list I found on the internet). We now incorporate take home readers from school along with the set I initially purchased and she is confidently attempting to read Level 3 and 4 books.

Slowly but surely her reading skills are building and occasionally I’ll include a Level 1 or 2 book into ‘book time’ and watch her read it independently just to remind myself just how far she has come.

About the author:

Jane is the author of many books for Curriculum Corporation, and for Ziptales. She is a primary teacher of considerable experience (Prep to Grade 6). She has three children, one of whom is autistic.