Reading and Down Syndrome - Part Two

Elementary School Age

As I’ve said in earlier posts, I did not have internet access when my daughter with Down syndrome (Ds) was in her infant/toddler years. I did not have access to information about early reading and Ds so we began teaching reading when Miss R was about 5. Teaching Reading to Children with Down Syndrome by Patricia Oelwein was my first purchase from the Woodbine House series Topics in Down Syndrome. This book was the first book to give me insight into how children with Ds learn and began my quest for more information specific to learning and children with Ds

As most of you know, Teaching Reading to Children with Down Syndrome, uses a combined approach - sight words moving into phonics in the form of word families. The games used in the books are interesting and fun – a perfect method for older children. This method uses errorless learning so our children not only have fun but they are successful.

Homeschooling moms tend to be purists – phonics is the only way for their kids! I had one mother say she was purposefully NOT teaching her child with Ds sight words – which made me very sad. I want to suggest that perhaps we put our pride behind us when teaching our little ones with Ds to read. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that we don’t teach phonics to our children with Ds. I am saying that we need to consider that our children with Ds have auditory processing issues – they have difficulty with remembering and sequencing sounds vs. remembering what they can see. Children with Ds tend to have difficulty blending sounds because they often have short-term memory difficulties. Word families remove that difficulty because they learn words in chunks (visual) vs. blending letter sound by letter sound through the whole word. In other words, they struggle to read a word instead of a smooth path with each word from beginning to end. Struggling will lead to a distaste for reading and most likely lead to avoidance and behavioral issues and we don’t want to go there! Nurturing a love of learning and keeping them successful will keep them coming back for more.

Another thing I might mention related to reading are those reading readiness skills. Most are related to auditory processing issues – a definite weakness for most of our kiddos with Ds. Most of our children will learn to read without them!

Back to my learning profile and children with Ds -- research suggests a distinct profile of areas of strengths & weaknesses within literacy skills in children with Ds. This profile includes stronger word identification skill, poorer word attack skills and poorer comprehension. Obstacles for sure but not something we can’t work on throughout their education!

Again, I’m not suggesting that phonics are unimportant, as our children get older they will use those skills to help them identify words they may not know. Every strategy we teach them will be important to their functional competence as adults. Just be sure to keep moving forward where they are successful – for most children sight word reading - while teaching phonics!

An excellent sight word reading program used by many homeschooling moms (and the public education system) is the Edmark Reading Program. Edmark uses errorless learning to teach children with special needs to read – guaranteed success for most children with Ds. The software version makes a homeschooling mom's life so much easier! For more reading curricula suggestions see this.

A great overview of teaching reading from DownsEd is found here. While you there, take a look at their See and Learn materials.

Reading and Down Syndrome Part One Early Reading and Down Syndrome