I have been touring various schools specifically designed for kids on the autism spectrum - and several of them spend reading time solely on sight words. One little boy - 5 - was refusing to read the sight words (nice, like, etc.) or in fact even look at them. The therapist gave no phonics help, jus...

Hi Jennie and Susan, Thanks for your insights. Susan wrote: Typically, though, children on the autism spectrum have difficulty with social interaction and social use of language (conversation), and depending on their other strengths and weaknesses, they have difficulty with non-literal language (fig...

Recently my oldest daughter (11yo) and my son (5yo) were diagnosed with Pragmatic Language Disorder, often considered on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum, characterized by high linguistic ability, struggle with social situations, and intense concern with rules and some other linguisti...

Hi Wendy, Thanks for your post. I have a niece and several nephews who found the overlays very helpful when they were getting remedial help in junior high. Could you tell me how an overlay is different, or rather is viewed differently by the reader, than colored paper and black-on-white paper? Also,...

I would add word families, also called onset and rime I believe.

Melissa
Minnesota

Just a guess, but a part word assembler would use context or guessing to figure out the word, whereas those techniques would not be possible for a pseudoword.

Melissa
Minnesota

Hi Katrina, Here are two of my daughter's favorite games. 1. Honk! This is adapted from the reading program Phonics Pathways. Make 3 copies of 5-6 correspondences on 3 x 5 cards (1 grapheme per card). Make 3 copies of a silly picture on 3 x 5 cards. Choose a silly action to do when the picture comes...

Sounds like you need some educationalese to keep the hounds at bay! I won't be able to help much there as I am not in the system, but I'll share some thoughts and perhaps your own research can take you the rest of the way. There are some real problems with sight word memorization. First, because the...

From the book cross-linguistic studies in dyslexia, it appears that children can have poor phoneme awareness even after explicit instruction. However, the studies do not seem to get at what is really happening. The researchers assumed phonemic awareness deficits but the tests didn't seem detailed en...

Katrina, In the end any one of the ways you describe could work. My personal preference is to teach the tricky parts as correspondences: t-wo, o-ne, sh-ou-ld, etc. The reason is no new conceptions of the language have to be taught, these are correspondences, just rare. For some words you can add in ...

Susan S,

Out of curiosity, what kind of people are doing these 10-20 page reports?

Melissa
Minnesota, USA

Jenny said: Parsing the grapheme-phoneme correspondences in words from our position of omniscience about spelling and pronunciation is all very well, but we need to convert the information into a form where it can be used in a practical way by young readers whose task is to work out the spoken forms...

Thanks for sharing your experiences Judy and Susan.

Melissa
Minnesota, USA

For those of you who work with struggling readers, do you find that their speed of learning increases over time? For example, when you first start working with the code it may take several (or more) sessions for the PGCs to be learned. However, after they have learned some and have mastered blending...

Susan, The tutor uses Barton Reading and Writing. There is a short screening test consisting of three parts: Identifying words in sentences, syllables in words, and remembering 3 phonemes in the correct order. The movement of colored squares is used to identify the relevant parts. If the student doe...