How can I teach Reading Comprehension to a child with Autism?
Before beginning to teach reading comprehension strategies for paragraphs and passages to a child with autism , you first need to be certain that your students or child with autism can comprehend oral questions.
Wh Questions are a great place to start teaching a child with autism to answer questions. Start by uisng questions naturally with your child or students with autism eg “What are you having for snack?” or “Where is your notebook?”. Quizes on general knowledge facts or your students’ interests can also be a good way to practice these questions.
With kids who are pre-verbal or minimally verbal take care not to keep asking WH questions to which both you and they already know the answers as that ca can be a big turn off for their speech & communication.
Once your students are successful at understanding and answering oral WH questions it’s time to move on to answering written questions. I like to start with an activity which gives a field of 2 or 3 answers to choose from, like these WH Questions Mats (which have picture clues) or these WH Questions Clip Cards.
The next step is to move onto open ended WH Questions. I’ve created a set of WH Questions Spinner Games to work on this goal.
Following Directions is another skill to work on for reading comprehension. Firstly with oral directions eg “Please put the book on the table”, and then reading written directions and following them. My Following Directions Mats is a fun activity for this, as are my Following Directions for Prepositions Worksheets and Following Directions Coloring Worksheets.
Do you use Interactive Books in your classroom or homeschool? They’re a great way to work on reading comprehension without students having to do any writing. Books like my Nouns Interactive Book require students to read a short sentence and complete it by finding the correct picture.
Reading simple clues is another fun activity to work on reading comprehension, such as my Clue Cards Mats or perhaps your students will enjoy Cut & Paste Sentence Comprehension Worksheets.
It’s important to give students lots of practice with sentence level reading comprehension skills before moving on to paragraphs and more complex passages. So if you’d like to check out more of my beginner level comprehension activities you can see them HERE.
Thanks for reading,
Kirsten