Creative Teaching

I have a son who is really having a hard time learning to read. We have been trying to teach him for several years but his Autism is preventing typical teaching from working. The school has him read out loud and memorize words which just doesn’t work for him. Memorizing has caused him to relate words with specific pictures and only those specific pictures. This results in him not being able to read a word that he has already read on a previous page because he memorized the entire previous page as an image. So, we are resulting in him having 10,000 words like “him” meaning completely different things to him. He is very bored with the idea of learning to read and frustrated with the way he is having to learn to read. At home we have tried several different ideas which have helped a little bit but not as much as we would like. I am certain we just haven’t found the best way to teach him, yet. Just the mere mention of words and looking at words causes him to clam up and refuse to try to read anymore.

Today, while daydreaming I got the greatest idea! I was thinking that we have approached this issue by trying to tap into his intellectual side, and just maybe that is the wrong way to go. Maybe we should instead tap into his creative side. So, I picked him up from school and told him to think about 10 words he had trouble reading. Which was followed by an “oooh” and then a “I hate words!”. I said we just need a list and what we are going to to is going to be really fun, I promise! He didn’t believe me, but I got him to give me ten words. Then I started making word art. I drew all the letters in different shapes, patterns, and colors. And sure enough, he started having fun and wanting to look at the words. He was giving them faces and making the letters into monsters! He stopped at two, but that is one heck of a good start!

So, I figure by doing this with all of the words he has trouble with he is going to be learning quite a bit.
1. He isn’t going to be so frustrated and reading will be a bit more fun.
2. He will have his own unique visual for each of the words he has trouble remembering.
3. He is going to learn how to break the words apart into separate letters, because he is drawing each one his own way.
4. He is going to be hearing the word as he says it to himself while he is drawing.
5. He is going to learn to spell each word and learn each letter as separate entities.
6. He is going to learn that learning can be fun and he can make it as fun as he wants to.

I will be curious to see how this works for him. If anything, it will be something fun for him to do.