When we look at what do children with autism bring to the table? Well one, they love visuals. So the fact that they love visuals make it such fertile ground for us to teach them to read. So immediately I start to make symbols make sense to them by using either real objects — miniature objects — or line drawings or real photographs, so they start seeing that symbolization. And then that makes them excited because those are visual and that’s exciting to them.
Many children — but not all — learn to decode quite early. I’ve had children who were three years old and could read The New York Times, and people go, “Oh my goodness!” Now, did she understand what she read? Oh, no. But she had this innate phonological sense, that she could read all of those words.
People used to say, “Oh, they have autism so that doesn’t mean anything, that they can call words.” Of course it does! We spend a huge amount of time using something that’s not innate, which is learning how to read, and teaching children phonics and how to read. With many children with autism we don’t have to do that.
So we have extra time to spend on those semantic connections that we want to make and really make the social communication part of that. Their memory for facts is absolutely wonderful.
Using their narrowed and restricted interests to help them explore their strengths and expand it — for instance, I had a child that wanted to be a pilot. It was perfect! You can find math in pilots, you can find geography in pilots, I can find biographies in pilots, it was wonderful. So we just expanded their narrowed or restricted interest in that.
They bring such fertile ground to want to read and such interests to want to read that it just makes you have so much fun when you’re working with reading comprehension.
