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One of my autistic children (first grade) is a fluent reader who is able to decode words well above grade level. Her reading comprehension scores, however, are below grade level. This discrepancy points to possible hyperlexia, a condition where a child can read accurately and fluently, but may not understand what they are reading. In order to work on this discrepancy, I started using “The Basic Reading Comprehension Kit for Hyperlexia and Autism” by Reese and Challenner. This article is a review of this curriculum.
Overview of The Basic Reading Comprehension Kit for Hyperlexia
After looking over this comprehension kit, I realized it is really designed for children with very limited language comprehension. The kit is advertised for children ages 5-12 in grades K-7. The first half of the book teaches vocabulary and sight words. Picture cards are included for matching activities. The second half of the kit includes more complex stories (in comparison to the first half of the book) and more comprehension activities including analyzing a picture for details, matching picture to sentence, sequencing, answering comprehension questions, and finding the main idea.
Benefits of The Basic Reading Comprehension Kit for Hyperlexia
There are a lot of picture supports throughout the entire series. The series does focus on key comprehension components and strategies including identifying the main idea and details, sequencing, and finding information in the text.
Limitations of The Basic Reading Comprehension Kit for Hyperlexia
Since my child has grade level verbal skills and oral comprehension, we skipped over the first half of the book. The second half of the book has been a little on the easy side for her as well. She has benefited from the picture analysis activities and finding the main idea activities.
Another limitation, at least for me, it that the book is only available in print. I absolutely hate making copies from books. I would rather click and print. It would be so much more convenient to have a pdf version of the activity pages.
Final Recommendations on The Basic Reading Comprehension Kit for Hyperlexia
This Reading Comprehension Kit would be beneficial for children who have strong decoding skills and reading fluency, but poor language comprehension skills overall. A Level 2 comprehension kit is also available. CLICK HERE to read my review of level 2. Both kits can be purchased from Linguisystems.com.
Other Comprehension Resources
- CLICK HERE to read my article about reading comprehension methods and strategies that work to activate prior knowledge and demonstrate how to process information from text.
- Many autistic children have difficulty answering inference-type questions from a text. The only resources I found to work on inference skills were from Teachers Pay Teachers. This site has a lot of teacher-created resources for sale that you may not be able to find anywhere else.
- I am also a big fan of Evan-Moor products. I use their Daily Comprehension Books for reading and comprehension practice. CLICK HERE to read my review of Evan-Moor’s Daily Reading Comprehension.