Summer break is full of adventure and fun activities. However, it is important to continue practicing reading and writing skills so that your child with autism does not lose the skills they worked on all year. Guess blogger Jessica writes a post about how to continue your child’s learning through the summer while still enjoying your break.

Why multi-sensory literacy?

Summer should be a time for splashing in the pool, roasting marshmallows, and taking camping trips with the family.   However, it’s also important to practice reading and writing skills to avoid the “summer slide”.   Research tells us that children who do not read over the summer can lose up to three months of reading achievement.  For children with autism, it is especially important that their hard-earned skills from the school year aren’t lost during the long summer months.

My son, like many children with autism, is a visual and a kinesthetic learner. This summer I’ve planned lots of fun, sensory-based literacy activities to help fill his days.  Here are some of the components that I plan to include:

Sight Word Time

Sight words are high frequency words that readers need to be able to recognize automatically, such as “the” and “what”.

There are many sight word (or high frequency word) lists on the Internet.  These lists will tell you which words should be mastered at each grade level.

There are many fun, multi-sensory techniques for practicing sight words.  Here are a few of my favorites:

• Fill a cookie sheet with sand, rice, or shaving cream and practice tracing sight words with your fingers.
• Play sight word games, such as memory matching, sight word “Go Fish”, etc.
• Use dry erase markers and practice writing sight words on a white board.

Reading Time

Picking the right book is half the battle.  Summer is a great time to visit the local library and bookstore.  It’s great to choose books that your child is interested in reading, but it’s also important to find books on your child’s reading level.  If the book is too hard for your child to read independently, you can read the book out loud and talk about the book with your child.

Ben isn’t a big fan of reading on his own yet, so we often partner read together.  Partner reading is where he reads a page and then I read a page.  This provides him an extra level of support and confidence.

One area of reading that is often difficult for Ben is comprehension.  He has trouble retelling the major events that happened in a story.  To help with this, we are going to make retelling ropes this summer.  Our “ropes” are going to be pipe cleaners with beads attached to them.  As Ben names an event in the story, he will move one of the beads on his rope until all the beads are moved.

Writing Time

Writing can be a struggle for children with fine motor delays.  At the beginning of kindergarten, Ben hated to write.  Now, Ben writes for fun almost every day.

I have two separate writing goals for Ben this summer.  One is to practice correct letter formation with proper letter size and spacing.  My other goal is to help Ben learn to write a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end.  One piece of advice that Ben’s OT gave me is to only work on one goal at a time so I’m not overwhelming him.

One method that has helped Ben this year with letter formation is an idea that his OT has developed called “stop light letters”.  Using the paper with the dotted lines in the middle, we use marker to draw a red line across the top line, a yellow line across the middle, and a green line across the bottom (just like a stop light).  Ben has learned that certain letters are “red light letters” (such as “h” and “t”) that extend from the red to green lines, while other letters (such as “e” and “r”) are yellow light letters.   This visual approach has helped him much more than language-based handwriting programs that talk about concepts such as “stretching to letter the sky” and “digging under the ground” that don’t hold concrete meaning to him.

In order to encourage story writing, we practice telling stories out loud first.  As we travel this summer to places like the beach or the zoo, these trips will become story ideas.  One thing I plan to do this summer is to take photos of our different adventures.  Later, Ben can practice sequencing these photos in the order that they happened and use this to write his stories.

Enjoy your summer and happy reading!
Article Provided by Jessica