Will a Phonics program work if my child has autism? He’s 8 years old, and kind of reads by memorizing the shapes of the letters.

I’ve worked with phonics in my school for several years now. During that time, we have had several autistic children enroll and participate in our reading program. We have had tremendous success in being able to teach these children the fundamentals of phonetic reading in our school. The methodology of phonics is simple and easy to understand, yet effective in helping children to retain the information and then immediately apply what they have learned.

In fairness, I need to state that we have not dealt with severely autistic children. Each autistic child that we have worked with has been officially diagnosed with the disease, but they had been worked with since diagnosis (home care, shadow program, etc.) and had become developmentally capable of being mainstreamed into a small group of same-aged children. I know there are many different levels of autism and each child is a different case with differing levels of abilities. But still, the results have been amazing to me as a teacher. I would highly recommend using a phonics program, as I’ve seen it work very well with mildly autistic children.