A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

We’ve arranged J’s schedule around so that I can try to figure out and support some of the things that are breaking down in math and English. We’ve taken Social Studies out of his schedule and for now he’s auditing science. Now J stays home the first two periods of his day (except choir days) and I can work with J one on one where there are less distractions and anxiety triggers and we can work on some of these things at J’s pace.

One thing I really, really have struggled to figure out is where things are falling apart in reading with J.

Here are the things he can do:
-sound out words (break words down into parts and put them back together in order to figure out how to read the entire word)
-read with expression and inflection (Speech therapy and fluency focus has trained him out of his mechanical, monotone autism voice. In fact, he usually has more inflection when he reads than when he’s spontaneously speaking).

Here’s the thing he can’t do:
-tell me the meaning of what he’s read without a lot of help and prompting.

When J is on his game, he sounds like an average reader. You would never know that he isn’t understanding what he’s reading.

At first, I thought that his lack of comprehension was closely tied with his lack of understanding of social skills. How can you interpret the motives of a character in a story when you can’t understand in real life why someone would lie to get out of trouble? I still think the social part is some of it, but it’s not all of it because J is starting to understand social skills and strategies better. Through speech therapy, he’s been drilled and trained over and over with those things. He’s starting to understand those things when I pull them out of the story and discuss them. He’s got glimpses of that kind of understanding. So I’m asking myself, where is the comprehension really breaking down?

As part of our “two hour mini homeschooling” I’ve started pulling out low reading level books everyday to help J gain confidence in his comprehension like fairy tales, fables, etc. Within two days I had a huge revelation.

I pulled out a Little Golden Book version of Star Wars: A New Hope and we started reading it together. After the first sentence, I asked J, “so what’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” he answered.

He read it again and again, and still no answer. Usually my strategy is to read a whole paragraph and have J pick out one thing he remembered and work back from there, but this time I wanted to see how much he was picking up sentence by sentence. And I realized it was very little at all.

I took the book away and had him “just listen” to the sentence. This time I read the sentence aloud, hoping that the absence of words and the chore of decoding letters and symbols into meaning would make it easier to understand. But it didn’t. In fact it made things a thousand times worse. Without the words visually in front of him, J was totally lost.

I read the sentence again: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away a terrible war rages as the Rebel Alliance struggles to defeat the evil Galactic Empire.”

I read the sentence 8 times. Each time, J got more anxious because he really didn’t understand it and it was really frustrating to him. Finally on the 8th try, J said, “there’s a war going on.”

“Good! good!” I said. Finally we were getting there. “Who is the war between?”

“the Empire”

“and…” I tried to pull it out without giving the answer.

“I don’t know.”

“Listen again.” I read the sentence again and he couldn’t give me the answer.

“The war is between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire.” I said giving him the answer. “Who is the war between?”

“Um..” more panic, frustrated looks from J. “The Empire?”

“The Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire. Do you know when the story takes place?”

A long pause. “I don’t know.”

“Do you know where the story takes place?”

“I don’t know!” And then then tears came.

And that’s when I realized that J’s reading issues have nothing to do with “reading” at all.

J couldn’t “hear” the story and effectively store in his memory the parts he could recognize.

Turns out that many kids with auditory processing issues have a hard time with reading comprehension, and the more I observe J, the more is apparent that J has some auditory processing issues. He says things like “I want to do 10 labs on the treadmill” or “dime of your life.” Songs are the worst. One day while listening to Imagine Dragons J said to me rather confused, “why do they say ‘life is in Norway?”

“Because they are saying ‘life is in no way,’ not ‘life is in Norway,’ J.”

This makes sense. Ever since J was a toddler he’s been notoriously sensitive to all sorts of sound stimuli. My guess here is that not only does he have a hard time “hearing” words, but has a hard time “hearing words” through the white noise. In fact, I read someone describe it as trying to listen to words through a waterfall. Most of us get our language exposure through the day in spoken communication. If you can’t decode that, how do you apply it to written language?

Because he’s taking so much time to figure things out, he has a hard time storing important information points in his head. That’s why he gets stuck on a few words and can’t keep up with the whole story (We were listening to NPR a few weeks ago and the story was about Clinton’s foreign policy and the word “drone” came up. J asked what a drone was and took the next minute or two processing what that meant. When I asked him by the end of the story what it was all about, J answered, “drones”). J has never been able to follow more than two oral commands. If I tell J to “hang up your coat, put your shoes away, and fill Fred’s water up” I can guarantee he won’t remember the “fill Fred’s water up” part. Almost always, the hardest sentence J encounters while reading is the first sentence because there are multiple ideas to process. Take a look at “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away a terrible war rages as the Rebel Alliance struggles to defeat the evil Galactic Empire.” There are four main thoughts happening in a single sentence–when the story is taking place, where the story is taking place, what is going on, and who the characters are. When you’re trying to process the words and then build point one on point two on point three on point four and then remember all of it before you move to the next sentence, it gets tricky.

I was excited and demoralized at the same time when I was able to really pinpoint his issues with reading comprehension. How has it taken this long to figure out where the breakdown is happening?

But as I researched some online resources, I found that there are lots of things you can do to help build up that memory muscle and ways to help with auditory processing issues. We’re trying some of these games and strategies in that two hour block before he goes to school and already I’ve seen some gradual improvement. Now that I know this about him, I’m really, really amazed how he’s gotten this far (and yes, most of everything is a struggle). Somewhere along the way he’s been trying to figure out his own coping mechanisms. Now we can start really helping him out.

Next week I’ll post some of the activities we’re trying to help with the auditory processing and the working memory issues. There’s a ton of stuff out there. Remember my post on the concussion test? Turns out there are lot of exercises similar to the ones that test utilizes that are easily accessible and you can do daily. Right now, I’m just celebrating this little enlightenment victory. This is huge.

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