Reading Success

As so many parents of children on the Autism Spectrum know, oral and written language processing can be a big challenge.  Because our childrens’ brains are wired differently, they don’t always process language in the same way as their neuro-typical peers.  It doesn’t mean they aren’t as bright or as motivated as the other kids, or that they can’t decode, or sound out words to read fluently as well either.  It just means that the message derived from those words doesn’t stick…kind of like eggs slipping off of a Teflon pan.  This is the issue I’ve had with my 9-year-old son, Evan.

Up until the end of second grade, both my husband and I, as well as Evan’s teachers, were impressed with his “reading” ability.  His fluency rate was at or above grade level and it appeared that it was not going to be a challenge for him.  THEN…third grade hit and anxiety became a very familiar feeling.  From Kindergarten through second grade, children are “learning to read.”  Once they reach third grade, they start “reading to learn.”  This transition from mechanics to comprehension can be very frustrating for the students, parents, and teachers.

My biggest fear this year was the approaching FCAT, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.  Every state has a similar testing process, but I knew that it was going to be an exceptional challenge for Evan.   I had been doing “extra” reading comprehension work with Evan for the last four years, so I could see the lack of progress.  I knew that the FCAT reading curriculum and standard Response to Intervention wasn’t going to work for him, as it hadn’t worked thus far, so I set out to try to get him exempt from the “cruel test.”  I began to research alternative teaching methods for him that I could do at home while working to convince the school district and the state of Florida that the FCAT was not an appropriate tool to measure the skills of a child with a language processing disorder.

After months of research, a failed FCAT and potential third grade retention, I found a reading program that promised to help with Evan’s comprehension difficulty.  The company is the Lindamoodbell Learning Process and the program is Visualizing and Verbalizing.  The basic premise of the program is this: many children who have Evan’s type of language processing disorder do not create imagery while they read.  Most of us make pictures in our minds as we read written language…kids like Evan do not.  In order to appropriately process language, this imagery is necessary.  Visualizing and Verbalizing teaches children how to make pictures in their minds based on the written language to create a “imaged gestalt”, or whole image, that they can then use to process the language with which they are presented.

When I first started reading the Teacher’s Manual, I couldn’t get over how much the children about whom the author was writing sounded exactly like Evan.  As I delved deeper into the material, I was convinced that this was the only program that would be able to teach him how to comprehend both the written and oral language with which he struggled so terribly.  Let’s just say that I WAS RIGHT!!

I started the program with Evan right after school was over in June.  He was required to attend summer school to remediate his skills and hopefully be promoted to 4th grade, but we worked every day after school for between 1.5 and 3 hours.  In the third week of June, I went to a workshop given by Lindamoodbell to learn how to teach the program.

When Evan started the program, he was only able to answer comprehension questions from 1st grade material.  (Remember, he had just completed third grade!)  By the middle of July, he was answering Higher Order Thinking questions from 3rd grade paragraphs with 90% accuracy.  It was a leap that no one, except the staff at Lindamoodbell, thought possible.  The program was working!

At the beginning of the summer, Evan had been so frustrated and had told me that he didn’t understand the words he was reading.  After six weeks, he not only was able to understand written language better, but his attention to oral language and conversation had improved as well.  He had gone from verbalizing what he saw in complex pictures, to creating images from words, then sentences, then paragraphs.  His visualization skills were developing and his understanding of the language around him had burst through a previously tightly sealed door.  The whole world is opening up to him, and this program is helping him walk an entirely new path.

Our work is not over, not by any means. Visualizing and Verbalizing has material that will take Evan all the way through high school, and that’s probably how long we will be using it.  Although it is not the only intervention that works for children with a language processing deficiency, it is the only one I found, after exhaustive research and praiseworthy parental recommendations, that has worked for Evan so far.  I will continue to use it to bolster his skills, improve his reading comprehension and writing, and, hopefully, help him to reach the wonderful academic potential of which we know he is capable.  It’s been a huge amount of work, but it is definitely well worth the effort.

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