Guided Reading for Students with Autism

For this week, I focused my efforts on finding articles about using Guided Reading in the field of Special Education.  I came across an article titled "Using Guided Reading with Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders," which explained how Guided Reading groups could help students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) be exposed to a larger variety of reading materials and to take a more active role in learning to read.  In the article, students with ASD are placed into guided reading groups, based on their skill levels, which were determined through several forms of assessment.  By being in small groups, students receive more one-on-one instruction and teachers are able to tailor activities to each student's particular needs.  Lower achieving students can benefit from observing higher achieving students, and the higher achieving students solidify their skills by helping to explain concepts to the lower achieving students.  Overall, the article said that the students with ASD have the ability to achieve 6-24 months of growth in their reading levels over a one year period, which I thought was amazing.

http://journals.cec.sped.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1429&context=tecplus

Vocabulary

When I think of vocabulary, I automatically remember having to write out definitions to the vocabulary words within a textbook chapter in middle school.  I would literally spend a couple hours a week copying sentences from a textbook to a piece of notebook paper, and the only thing I cared about was that everything looked neat and tidy.  I now realize that our teachers thought that copying definitions would help build our vocabularies, but that activity probably didn't help us much at all.  From reading Blachowicz and Fisher's article "Vocabulary Lessons," I learned that there are many useful, yet entertaining, ways to help children build their vocabularies.  There are two key words that stick out to me when discussing vocabulary, and they are "fun" and "repetition."  One common theme in many areas of learning is that children learn better when the subject matter seems interesting and they are having fun, so it seems that playing games associated with building vocabulary is the perfect way to help children become interested in new words.  When I think back to middle school and how boring and monotonous vocabulary definitions were, I can't help but to think how my vocabulary knowledge might be different if we had actually enjoyed learning those new words.  The other word that comes to mind about vocabulary is "repetition," and this is based on information from the article, as well as personal experience.  When a child is exposed to something repeatedly, they are more likely to remember the information.  By reading to children and playing word games with them, they will be exposed to many more words and start to remember the definitions by simply coming into contact with the words.

The article by Pardo about reading comprehension verified some opinions I have had about comprehension for a long time.  One of which is the opinion that just because a child can read words doesn't mean they can comprehend what the words mean.  The elementary school I attended growing up was very traditional in how they taught reading comprehension......if a student was a good "reader," they must also be good at comprehension.   As a child, I suspected that that scenario was not completely accurate, because I was consistently one of the best readers for my age, but I never seemed to "get" what I was reading as well as the other kids.  I now realize that I struggled with comprehension, even though I was good at the mechanics of reading.
I am really happy that emphasis is now being put on several different aspects that aid in comprehension.  Students do need a certain amount of practice at decoding and memorization, but I think that other components to comprehension are equally, if not more so, important.  Two of these components are the teacher being able to present the material in interesting and exciting ways and helping the student relate the information to events or ideas that are specifically meaningful to that child.  I have always found that if information is interesting to me or relates to aspects in my life, I am able to understand what I read about that topic better than if I had no interest at all.