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Reading comprehension materials for autism spectrum kids...


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I am looking for something  to use with dd 13 (reading at about 5th grade level) to help with reading  comprehension.  She especially has difficulty with summarizing, idioms, and to a lesser degree  story elements such as setting, character. I know that for the idioms I have to explicitly  explain many of them to her as she is a very literal thinker. She hasn't really done any formal writing program and she tends to copy things directly from stories instead of putting things into her own words. Has anyone found anything geared for kids on the spectrum that deal with these issues and perhaps other ones that we haven't even discovered yet? 

Thank you!

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Maybe ESL resources?  I know I had a great idiom book that helped me with German idioms when I was studying German.  You could also try the 4th reader of the 1879 McGuffey, it is free online in PDF to try, it has comprehension questions and difficult words diacritically marked and defined.

 

Here is an ESL comprehension resource from a friend/mentor of Don Potter, he also used it for non ESL students who needed explicit help in that area, it is in both English and Spanish, keep scrolling through if it switches to Spanish:

 

http://www.donpotter.net/pdf/gonzalez_materials.pdf

 

 

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For your inferences, idioms, etc., you might want to get some therapy materials. Or google for lists and just do them yourself.  Like print a list, cut into strips, and put them in a jar, doing one a day.  You could draw it in a journal and have fun with them.  I know it skunks me to no end when I look at some therapy flashcard said and it's gonna be like $15 for 25 word pairs.  That's a lot of money when you're not doing it for pay.  

 

I only know what my friend tells me she did with her autism-labeled dc, which was nurturing mental flexibility.  So, for instance, they did 100 Days of Writing, which has exercises where you intentionally try to write something WITH ERRORS and then trade and try to find them!  They did Listography notebooks and lots of list-making.  I just picked up a book Rip the Page, Adventures in Creative Writing that has that same idea of nurturing flexibility, word retrieval, and comfort, but it's a bit lower level than 100 Days, something you could do in small chunks.  There are the Don't Forget to Write! books (elementary and high school), which again nurture *flexibility*.  I'm concerned about what happens when you take someone who is already inherently rigid and teach them with a really rigid writing curriculum.  On the other hand, you have the balancing issue of EF, that the child may struggle to comprehend structure, so you get this dual goal set.

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I just purchased this to use for idioms.

 

http://www.superduperinc.com/products/view.aspx?pid=BK333&stid=#.VSl0nuT8zPc

 

(I still haven't figured out how to rename links, but the book is called Read Between the Lines by Super Duper Publications.)

 

We haven't started it yet but the format and exercises are very hs friendly.

 

For general reading comprehension, SRA worked really, really well but it is expensive. The Memoria Lit. guides also seemed to work. It was very helpful to be able to preteach vocabulary and they had the right mix of comprehension questions--many concrete ones, and a few abstract "stumpers" he really had to think about.  I think any structured lit. guide could be useful, especially one that actively teaches comprehension strategies.

 

For summarizing I recently started DS1 on WWE, Level 1. We are only doing the narration portions. I'm hoping this will help him with both summarizing and verbal comprehension.  R&S's approach to teaching summarizing also worked well, but I wanted something more targeted & quick for afterschooling.

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This may sound strange, but one of the things that helped my ASD kiddo the most with those things was Wordly Wise. The last page of each vocab lesson is a story that the student reads and answers questions about. At first he really struggled looking for meaning where a question wasn't explicitly answered, summarizing an idea or part of the text or with any abstract presentation of ideas. Slowly over a period of years using this curriculum, he made a night and day turn around from me having to help with every question to being able to complete them all correctly on his own. It really was helpful. He always had a very advanced vocabulary because he loved to read. For him Wordly Wise wasn't about learning new words, it was about learning how to use words he already knew and how to draw greater meaning from what he was reading.

 

ETA: There were other helpful activities, designed for learning the words, but that helped ds learn to USE the words. For example, they will give two very similar words and provide sentences that you have to choose which word to put in each. The nuance of which word to use was something ds often didn't get. The only negative on these workbooks was there was a lot of sentence writing. I only required ds to write out sentences for the final page described above to practice answering questions in a complete sentence. The "rewrite the sentence" type activities where you corrected one word, he just wrote the correction, not the sentence. it took a little adapting of the instructions, but it was easy to make it dysgraphic friendly.

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This may sound strange, but one of the things that helped my ASD kiddo the most with those things was Wordly Wise. The last page of each vocab lesson is a story that the student reads and answers questions about. At first he really struggled looking for meaning where a question wasn't explicitly answered, summarizing an idea or part of the text or with any abstract presentation of ideas. Slowly over a period of years using this curriculum, he made a night and day turn around from me having to help with every question to being able to complete them all correctly on his own. It really was helpful. He always had a very advanced vocabulary because he loved to read. For him Wordly Wise wasn't about learning new words, it was about learning how to use words he already knew and how to draw greater meaning from what he was reading.

That's an interesting idea!  Thanks for sharing!  :)

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  • 3 weeks later...

I just came across an interesting looking reading comp & oral language program today designed for kids with ASD. It doesn't sound like it targets the skills that the OP is hoping for, but I thought it would be good to add to this thread for future reference: http://mindwingconcepts.com/autism/the-autism-collection-item-04-000

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I haven't used this, so I can't tell you if it's the right range of skills for you. It's been recommended on similar threads and sits on my wishlist for the time being.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1937473112/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_S_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=3494X931L2H07&coliid=I2AV4GS4V05N9B

 

I've used Inference Jones by The Critical Thinking Company. I would not start with that until basic reading comprehension is settled, but it's great for learning about inferencing. I just wish they had more books in the series. They have one for 3rd/4th and one for 5th/6th. The difficulty of the inferences is the same in both books, IMO, but the length of the reading selections and the reading level of those passages are different. 

 

The Reader's Handbook (at least the 6th-8th grade level) has a lot of the skills you are looking at. They have handbooks for a variety of reading levels, and they also have student application books if you want to use them. They are very inexpensive on Amazon. 

 

My son's writing tutor and I agree that part of what is making my son struggle with writing is being able to categorize things easily and efficiently, put labels on things, etc. For instance, he can explain, in a paragraph's worth of words, what makes something related, different, etc., but he can't use a word or phrase to do that. He also tends to blur the lines between different kinds of thinking, and then that backfires when we try to outline, etc. For instance, he'll start outlining, and end up summarizing instead. Since he used to have some troubles with summarizing (the original words stick in his mind too well), we are happy that he can do this, but it tends to make a mess of things! As for his actual writing output, he struggles with paragraphs and such (how much to put in, what is not obvious to others when they read his paragraph, etc.). 

 

As for learning to summarize, I share OhElizabeth's fear of structured writing programs coupled with ASD, though some people use them to great success. I do like IEW's approach to learning to retell/summarize something with a keyword outline. Again, my son remembers the original phrasing of what he reads and hears really well, and it gets in the way. So sometimes, it's nice to make a keyword outline and then let it sit a bit before rewriting something. That gives him some time to forget those turns of a phrase that got his attention.

 

You might find some very fun and useful picture books about figures of speech and idioms in the library. Ours has them with the Brian Cleary grammar books and things like that. Sometimes they offer a history of each figure of speech. There is always Amelia Bedelia too, though she stresses me out a bit. 

 

A friend of mine has been using (and LOVING) the lit guides from http://www.classroomcompletepress.com/products/index.php?cc_EducationTypeID=17&cc_SubjectID=5&root

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This may sound strange, but one of the things that helped my ASD kiddo the most with those things was Wordly Wise. The last page of each vocab lesson is a story that the student reads and answers questions about. At first he really struggled looking for meaning where a question wasn't explicitly answered, summarizing an idea or part of the text or with any abstract presentation of ideas. Slowly over a period of years using this curriculum, he made a night and day turn around from me having to help with every question to being able to complete them all correctly on his own. It really was helpful. He always had a very advanced vocabulary because he loved to read. For him Wordly Wise wasn't about learning new words, it was about learning how to use words he already knew and how to draw greater meaning from what he was reading.

 

ETA: There were other helpful activities, designed for learning the words, but that helped ds learn to USE the words. For example, they will give two very similar words and provide sentences that you have to choose which word to put in each. The nuance of which word to use was something ds often didn't get. The only negative on these workbooks was there was a lot of sentence writing. I only required ds to write out sentences for the final page described above to practice answering questions in a complete sentence. The "rewrite the sentence" type activities where you corrected one word, he just wrote the correction, not the sentence. it took a little adapting of the instructions, but it was easy to make it dysgraphic friendly.

We had a very similar experience with Wordly Wise, including reducing the amount of writing in the same way as mentioned above. At 14, ds has got half way through the grade 12 book and he has got so much out of the series. With all the discussion we did with Wordly Wise, he is also now much more likely to ask me about things he doesn't understand when he is reading.

 

The other thing we did with writing was to work on it orally with me acting as scribe, and then having him copy what I had scribed. Coming up with the content and getting it down onto paper was too much for him all in one go.

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