Are your students with autism beginning readers?

Do your older autistic students struggle with reading fluency?

Do your students with autism know what to do when they come across new words?

Teaching Phonics to your students or homeschool child with autism will help them become more confident & fluent readers.

These simple steps which you can use in your classroom or homeschool, will help your students or child with autism to develop Phonemic Awareness - ie the awarenss that words are made up of different sounds:

• Rhyming songs and poems are a great way to introduce kids to hearing the sounds of words. When you first introduce rhymes emphasize the end sounds, but be careful not to distort the sounds be adding an extra ‘u’ on the end

  e.g If you’re saying “The dog saw a frog” be careful not to say “dog-u” & “frog-u”.

• When you’re singing rhyming songs, it’s easier for your kids to have time to process the words & sounds if you don’t use recorded music initially. When you sing, pause at the end of the line to let your kids fill in the missing words

  eg “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you …… (pause)”

• Play oral games & do quizes, like “I spy something that rhymes with cat…….”. Or “Can you think of a word that rhymes with box?”

• Once your students or child with autism can confidently rhyme words orally, it’s time to move on to looking at written rhyming words. Start with CVC (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) words eg bug rhymes with rug. My CVC Rhyming words match cards can be used in small groups or 1-to-1 to show your students how the words end with the same sound (later on once your students are decoding CVC words they can also use this set as an independent task)

• The next step to teaching Phonics to your students or child with autism, is to look at all the sounds in words. Start with the beginning sounds first. This is not about teaching the names of the letters of the alphabet, but the sounds which the letters make. Firstly use everyday items, or even better use items your students with autism are interested in

  eg If a child likes pets, show them a toy cat and say “Cat begins with c, c-at”, “Dog begins with d, d-og”

• I spy is a great game for this (remember to use sounds, not letter names), but scanning a whole room looking for answers is often difficult for autisctic children who get overloaded by processing too much visual information, so present a page with several simple pictures or stickers on it instead and say “Find something beginning with the sound d”

• Use letter tiles to spell a word on the table, but miss out the beginning letter, tell the child what word you’re making and ask them to help you to find the missing beginning sound from a field of 2 or 3 letter tiles.

• Do your kids love write & wipe activities? Use this Beginning Sounds Picture Match set to get them matching pictures to the beginning sounds. Remember to say the letter sounds, not the letter names.

• I’ve created lots more Phonics resources for you to use in your classroom or homeschool, which you can check out HERE

I hope you & your students/kids find these introductory phonics activities helpful & fun!

Students of all abilities who become dependent on looking at pictures when they learn to read, won’t find it difficult to master decoding words. My next blog post is full of tips and strategies for teaching Decoding.

I hope this information on teaching phonics to kids with autism has been helpful!

Kirsten