Helping With Reading Comprehension

Several years back, I had a 5th grade boy on my caseload who had Autism.  I was primarily working with him on addressing his sensory processing needs, motor planning, etc.  I partly knew what was going on as far as curriculum in his 5th grade regular ed classroom because I had a son in that same grade at that time.  They were reading some wonderful 5th grade level books/fiction and then completing some really cool projects to go with each book.  But, not this student.  He could read fluently, and in fact could read as good or better than his same age peers in the classroom.  However, because of his difficulty with reading comprehension, the Reading Milestones curriculum was being used with him.  He would go to the resource room, accompanied by his paraprofessional, for individualized instruction with reading.  His paraprofessional also worked on reading with him outside of the resource room.  The content of the books in the Reading Milestones curriculum was way below this boy's cognitive level.  He was a 5th grader reading stories such as “The Three Little Pigs” and “Little Red Riding Hood.”  How exciting, right? No wonder he didn't like reading.  I asked his teacher about it, and she shared my concerns.  She felt that this student would be able to answer the comprehension questions associated with the 5th grade text and could learn the concepts being taught in the books if he could be given more choices and if the format was presented differently. However, the reading strategist felt that this student needed to continue reading books at his comprehension level (even if the content is inappropriate for his age) as a way to measure his comprehension level and keep track of progress.  The regular ed teacher felt that her hands were tied. And I was "just an OT," so my opinion on reading didn't really count in the great scheme of things! It just so happened that not long after that, as I was in one of my graduate classes en route to my master's in autism spectrum disorders, we learned about how to address reading comprehension by making things more visual and predictable for our students with ASD.  And so, I put together something for this student's paraprofessional to try with him to improve his comprehension and so that he could participate with his classmates in enjoying more age appropriate books.  (Of course, he still had to continue with his leveled readers per school requirements.)  Many of you educators will already know these techniques, but for those that aren't familiar, I will go over what I put together so that maybe you can try some of these techniques, too.  Maybe you are a parent and you want to read some quality books with your child at home, and you want to help with comprehension~

Here are the steps that I will go over in subsequent posts to address improving reading comprehension:

• Priming the background knowledge
• Doing a picture walk
• Making visual maps
• Think alouds and reciprocal teaching
• Understanding narrative text structure
• Goal structure mapping
• Emotional Thermometers
• Social stories