very first step toward reading?

Others may have different thoughts but I would start with teaching that communication can be done with symbols- schedule boards and sequences of activities etc. I would also work with labeling of high interest stuff- like family members pictures and foods.

Letters and sounds are a REALLY abstract place to begin for kids whose learning curve is very slow…

Robin

You might look at Teaching Reading to Children with Down Syndrome by Patricia Logan Oelwein; it uses pictures not phonics or sound/symbol cues. For much older students, Edmark is sometimes used.

the first thing you have to teach is just the concept of symbols and then sounds. Plus you must teach that print goes from left to right. I would teach the sounds and the symbols and not even teach letter names. They are too confusing. Once they have the idea of print and words as a form of communication then you can begin working on patterns and making words using the sound symbols. Go to this site
http://www.readamerica.net

Try some shared reading with a big book or transparency. Also use their names. Remember that that are functioning like 3 year olds. What would you do if you were the parent of a 3 year old?

It depends where they are. And what “functioning like three-year-olds” is supposed to mean.
I worked with one multiply-handicapped kid who, I was assured in no uncertain terms by the school psychologist, was functioning overall as a three-year-old. Actually he was communicating with the outer world very poorly, but in fact he had a lot more going on inside which the psychologist should have seen and didn’t. That student learned to read at a normal pace for a Grade 1 kid.
Anyway, in general three-year-old development is all over the shop anyhow — some are ready for school and some are barely talking and not toilet-trained, and both extremes are considered “normal”. It’s a highly variable stage of development.
In your case, the first thing to do is some teaching interviews and informal testing and inventories. How well do these kids speak? If they barely use two-word sentences or if their pronunciation requires an interpreter, well, verbal development is the place to start. If they speak OK for pre-school/kindergarten children, then you can start teaching symbols. Do they already know their colours? And if so, how many? (red, yellow, blue? green, purple, orange, black, white? brown, pink, grey? light/dark shades? If they know five or six colours, that’s good for K, so go on with more detail; if not, well, there’s something to teach. Can they recognize and name things from pictures, at least things within their speaking vocabulary? If yes, well, you can introduce more from pictures; if not, understanding pictures (especially black and white line drawings) is a learned skill in itself and you can start teaching
. Can they count at all, even 1-2-3? If yes, you can continue teaching, and if not, there’s a place to start.

For general education, I would get lots of little books of the type of “colours and shapes” “Friendly animals” “My family” and so on, and introduce the kids to things in them and get them talking. By the way, books such as Richard Scarry’s that are crammed full of detail are much loved by adults but are not so hot for teaching basics — too much confusion and distraction; it;s better to get really simple things with one idea per picture. I would also try playing simple games with them. Give them markers (easy on the hand) and encourage them to draw. Play counting things out loud. And a very very very good thing to do is to get a book of classic nursery rhymes, illustrated in a realistic style, and recite the rhymes with rhythm and encourage the kids to recite them with you and to memorize them; this teaches all kinds of verbal skills, trains memory, is a lot of fun, and gives the kids a “party trick” to show what they are learning which is so good for self-esteem. (But please don’t tell either the kids or their parents that they are “reading” when they are memorizing!) These are all things I did with my own daughter at age 2-3, and she enjoyed them and benefited from them.

Once the kids have a speaking vocabulary of several hundred words reasonably well-pronounced, can follow directions, handle a book, and recognize pictures, and know a few symbolic ideas such as colours and numbers up to three (which may be right away, and on the other hand may take a year) then you can do well to start teaching the alphabet. As mentioned above, better to teach just the sounds rather than letter names. And teach only lower-case at first (over 95% of text is lower-case, so the capitals-first system teaches how not to read books as well as bad handwriting habits). Use either blank paper without lines, or a white board, and encourage them to make letter shapes with large arm motions, and follow directionality properly — save a lot of trouble later if you don’t teach bad habits now.

Something like Phonographix/reading Reflex OR Orton-Gillingham can be useful as a guide after you have these basics but with these kids you won’t want to rush or pressure them.

Please don’t teach them letter names. It is so hard for mentally challenged to get beyond letter names when you try to teach them the sound/symbol relationship next. They just don’t understand. I have had a lot of luck with PG for the mentally challenged because it doesn’t have rules or abstract logic. ‘Silent’ E, long and short letters, and rules are very hard for many kids to grasp let alone those that are mentally challenged. PG works very well for the MR/slightly autistic as well.

Orton-Gillingham is way too complex for low IQs. It and it’s clones, ex. Wilsons, were designed for thoses students with average to above average intelligence. Too many schools use these programs for all LD and MR students and they just don’t work if abstract reasoning is an issue.

My first impression on the first skill in reading is simply - listening and gathering a receptive vocabulary. That is why we sing, play with nursery rhymes, and read stories.

In the teaching of math, you begin working with manipulatives such as cylinder boxes, cuisenaire rods, cups (beans - or the Southern version - black-eyed peas - to replace messy water), counting games, and picture drawing.

Go to www.picturemereading.com and check out a unique method of incorporating pictorial clues within letters and words. When the pictures are later “faded” the meaning of the word remains and the child reads it on sight. It is successful with all kinds of “special needs” kids (autistic, Downs, Fragile X Syndrome, apraxic, and brain damaged) and also gives regular kids a phenomenal jump start into reading.

This depends on what your situation is and what your goals are. If you are dealing with a severely handicapped child and you have no real expectation that the child will ever progress beyond the early elementary school level, then memorization and picture reading may be the best thing you can do.

If however you think that the child will progress to high school level, then teaching reading by memorization has been proved over and over to be a dead end — you can apparently go quite fast until you hit a brick wall, and then what? Even kids with no disabilities have a real problem dropping memorization and re-learning to read all over again; for those who already have a hard time this is too much to load on them.

I taught two boys with genetic disabilities, brothers, one diagnosed with Kleinfelter’s Syndrome (somewhat similar to fragile X, a chromosomal irregularity) age 12, and one undiagnosed but with severe multiple communication disorders age 8. Both of them progressed phenomenally when given direct phonics instruction and practice reading connected text with controlled vocabulary and repetition. Both progressed over a year’s reading in six months of part-time tutoring, the older from Grade 1 to grade 3+, the younger from early K to Grade 1+

In dealing with any students, avoid both extremes: don’t start too high and expect skills that they haven’t learned yet and don’t have the background to learn, but equally don’t set your expectations too low and put them in a dead end.