Some day, my son is definitely going to be able to read. He can do a little bit of spelling now using apps, some sight word memory games (where the sight words are turned over and he creates matches from memory). Lately I have been practicing his scanning with him by giving him fields of sight words varying in number (last two sessions were 12-13), putting them on the table in different orders each trial and giving his stack to sort that are arranged in different orders from what is on the table. His average accuracy is around 88% with fields that high, 100% with fields half that size. I switch the words each day, and he’s usually hitting 100% accuracy for even the larger fields by the last trial each day. Sometimes I ask him to give me a certain word when we are cleaning up the cards, and his accuracy goes down to about 70% for that. I’ll still take it, because what it tells me is that he recognizes those words and it’s more than just luck.

As I see it, Tony’s primary motivation for learning how to read is going to be so that he can be more specific in telling us about things he wants because then he’ll be able to select from larger lists of words on his speech device. For the learning part, there still needs to be time with his kindle or candy at the end of any task before he’s willing to do the tasks he needs to learn. He’s still not thrilled to be doing this sort of thing, and we have to start out slow and build up just like everything else or even then he won’t want to cooperate because it feels harder for him to focus for longer periods of time.

But, someday we won’t need that because he will see how it can benefit him more directly, and that is going to be a beautiful day. I put some video clips of recent matching sessions below for those of you who are viewing this on the web page.