Autism and Hooked on Phonics

My eldest son has Asperger's and was hyperlexic meaning he learned to read on his own really early around age three with no instruction from anyone. I didn't have to teach him to read at all. We did have to work on reading comprehension at the appropriate age, and we still work on that quite a bit.

Now we are to my six year old who has an "official" diagnosis of PDD-NOS (atypical Autism) and Expressive Receptive Language Disorder. We started working on reading last year in Kindergarten since that is what we felt we were "supposed" to do. Can you tell I am a little jaded on this whole grade level thing? Anyways, he has known most of his letter sounds for some time now just for the countless hours spent in speech therapy and working with flash cards in therapy just learning to make those sounds, so I had hoped reading would just be the next natural step. Unfortunately that has now been the case. We tried using Starfall.com which is wonderful by the way. This is what we used to help my daughter who is now nine learn to read. However, it moved to quickly it seemed and frustrated him. We then tried Hooked on Phonics for the IPad since he likes using his speech therapy apps on the iPad, but he just ended up tapping and guessing instead of focusing   on what he was doing. Another iPad app called Reading Raven was helpful, but everything still wasn't clicking, and he was resisting even playing the apps. Needless to say, we were both quite frustrated and didn't look at anything meant to teach him to read all summer. We took a much needed break.

Here we are at the start of first grade, and we are back at it. A good friend gave me an older version of the Hooked on Phonics books. We started on those and for some reason it has started clicking at least slowly. It seems the apps and games are too much of a distraction. Both the Hooked on Phonics app and hard copy highly focuses  on word families specifically 'at' and 'an' in the first lesson, but he didn't seem to understand the concept until we used the books with no distractions and a simple chalk board switching out the first letter in the words. It did take him a full two weeks of school to get the idea, but we are finally finished with the first lesson and seem to be on our way to reading.

I do think using multiple methods to reinforce has really made the most difference. Using the black and white books helped eliminate distractions, but he really enjoyed going back over the lesson in the app when we were done. He was so proud when he read his first little story. It melted my heart! He also really enjoyed doing the word families on the chalkboard, so he could switch out the letters to change the words. I will definitely be updating as we journey through the year.