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Reading fluency includes correctly pronouncing words, keeping an appropriate pace, and utilizing appropriate expressions. It benefits reading comprehension, as those who read fluently tend to comprehend the material better.

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The video describes what reading fluency consists of and supports my definition. It gives examples of appropriate reading fluency, which is a great way to use it for a teaching lesson or as a review for an older age group of students.

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Text comprehension is the capacity to comprehend the meaning of what one reads. After reading a story, students reflect on their existing knowledge and focus on skills such as making predictions, identifying the main idea, understanding details, summarizing, and making inferences.

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Phonics is the relationship between the sound and the letters that represent them in the written language. Decoding is the most significant part of phonics. There are two approaches to phonics instruction:

Explicit Phonics Instruction: teaching sounds and spellings directly.

Implicit Phonics Instruction: introducing sounds through whole words as needed.

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Six common reading characteristics, challenges or barriers that students with autism may face 

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Six common reading characteristics, challenges or barriers that students with autism may face 

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Approximately 65% of students with ASD have difficulty measuring reading skills, according to the START Project.

Reading challenges fall into three categories: print skills, comprehension strategies, and vocabulary knowledge (understanding of terminology)

Struggle with executive function, organizing and planning reading, making irrelevant connections, and shifting meanings across contexts.

Students on the spectrum often focus intensely on preferred interests, struggle with engagement in non-preferred texts, fixate on specific words or phrases, and may not monitor their comprehension due to these interests.

Students on the spectrum struggle with utilizing background knowledge, understanding semantics, and comprehending socially contextual text compared to technical text.

Students with ASD struggle with pragmatics, which applies to understanding language and communication in social contexts to predict others' perspectives and behaviors.

Students with ASD have difficulty understanding pronouns, the subtle differences in word meanings, and answering questions or showing what they know.

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 Helpful Information Supporting Reading Challenges/Barriers 

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 Helpful Information Supporting Reading Challenges/Barriers 

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The START Project: Literacy and Students with Autism highlights ten factors that influence literacy, concentrating on the difficulties related to the Theory of Mind and Social Emotional Reciprocity, which restrict understanding of characters' viewpoints and feelings.

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Phonemic Awareness is the most minor component in spoken language, encompassing the understanding of words. It includes four developmental levels:

1. Word Awareness

2. Syllable Awareness

3. Onset-Rime Awareness

4. Phonemic Awareness

Developing Phonemic Awareness at a young age is critical for becoming a proficient reader and speller.

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The Institute of Education Science (IES) blog points out that while autistic students have difficulty with reading comprehension, they master letter-identifying and sounds. The blog emphasizes the challenges related to social communication and proposes methods to improve literacy growth for young elementary learners.

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April is Autism Awareness Month, which celebrates the importance of people with autism, the contributions they make every day to our world, and what we are learning about improving outcomes for the growing number of people with autism. IES supports research in this area, primarily through grants funded by the National Center for Special Education Research. Dr. Emily Solari at the University of Virginia (UVA) was awarded an IES grant in 2018 to lead an autism-focused postdoctoral training program. This program provides postdoctoral fellows with extensive research training in the academic, behavioral, and social development of students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) from pre-K through their transition out of secondary school. Currently, their research focuses on literacy development, including reading comprehension and writing, in children with ASD.

Below we share a recent conversation with Dr. Solari about the importance of this work and what she and researchers at UVA are learning about literacy development.
What do we know about the needs of students with ASD in the area of literacy?
Children with ASD have a unique constellation of strengths and weaknesses that impacts their academic development. Several studies by our research group and others have shown that children and adolescents with ASD are at risk for difficulties in the area of literacy. Some individuals with ASD show a particular strength in alphabet knowledge, including letter names and sounds, as well as reading words. A strength in word reading ability does not always translate into adequate reading comprehension. Many adolescents with ASD who can successfully read words still demonstrate difficulties with reading comprehension, especially comprehension that requires inferencing. Difficulties may be due, in part, to the highly social content that is embedded in stories. Children with ASD often struggle in the area of social communication and theory of mind (understanding others' mental states), which may inhibit their ability to comprehend narrative texts. Additionally, we know that vocabulary and oral language are both important for reading comprehension; therefore, difficulties in these areas - often seen in individuals with ASD - may impact reading comprehension as well.

Similarly, the existing data show that children with ASD have a more difficult time with writing-related tasks, such as composition. Our work in this area suggests that these writing difficulties may be due to broader difficulties related to language development and social communication skills.
What research is being done to address the needs of students at different ages?
While we are beginning to understand developmental trajectories of reading for this population, very little research has been conducted on specific interventions for reading and writing. Our research group has begun to look at early elementary (K-3 rd grade) language and reading comprehension interventions for students with ASD. Our initial studies have shown that when we implement highly interactive language and listening comprehension instruction, these students show gains in oral language and listening comprehension. We have found that instructional strategies that use shared book reading, where the teacher reads aloud from a book and asks children targeted questions about the characters in the story, are effective. Our instruction also provides students practice with vocabulary words and opportunities to respond to texts both orally and through writing.

There are also other research groups investigating emergent literacy (prekindergarten years) with this population of students. For example, Jaclyn Dynia at The Ohio State University has engaged in work investigating strengths and weaknesses in emergent literacy skills such as phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and print awareness. Also, in the early childhood years, Dr. Veronica Fleury at Florida State University is engaged in some work in this area, including an IES-funded study aimed at developing and testing the feasibility of an adaptive shared book reading intervention for preschoolers with ASD.

To address difficulties in reading comprehension with older students, Michael Solis and his team at the University of California, Riverside are using IES funding to develop and test explicit instructional routines and curricular materials for a reading comprehension and behavior intervention for students with ASD in upper elementary and middle school.

In collaboration with our colleagues at the University of California, Davis, we continue to analyze and publish developmental studies examining literacy skills. Additionally, we have become increasingly interested in understanding the transition from prekindergarten to kindergarten and early elementary school and how literacy is developing during this time. At UVA, we have started a longitudinal data collection project to investigate the relations among early reading, oral language, social attention, and cognition variables in young children with higher functioning ASD.

Our group is also starting to think about how we can design interventions that specifically target early reading skills and language development as well as social communication skills. Children's books often provide very rich opportunities to engage around events and feelings that could be used to teach children with ASD social communication skills. Our next school-based intervention study will combine our previously successful language and listening instruction with targeted social communication instruction.
What recommendations or resources do you have for parents who are supporting children with ASD as they learn from home during the pandemic?
Here are some tips for reading at home with children. Additional resources are below.

Friends on the Block was developed through an IES grant as an early literacy curriculum for children with disabilities. They have provided some free content online for use at home by caregivers.

Self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) is an approach that emphasizes direct instruction of writing strategies, knowledge, and self-regulation skills via flexible, recursive instructional stages. SRSD approaches have been shown to be effective for some elementary and middle school children with autism.

Book Share Time provides read aloud texts and allows caregivers to filter the books based on specific speech or language goals.

This blog was co-authored by Sarah Brasiel (Sarah.Brasiel@ed.gov), Amy Sussman (Amy.Sussman@ed.gov), Katie Taylor (Katherine.Taylor@ed.gov) at IES and Emily Solari (ejs9ea@virginia.edu), and her IES funded postdoctoral fellows (Alyssa Henry & Matthew Zajic) at UVA. IES hopes to encourage more research on students with ASD in the coming years in order to increase the evidence base and guide program and policy decisions.

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national center for education research (ncer)

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Meeting the Literacy Needs of Students with Autism: What Do We Know and Where Do We Need to Go?

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April is Autism Awareness Month, which celebrates the importance of people with autism, the contributions they make every day to our world, and what we are learning about improving outcomes for the growing number of people with autism. IES supports research in this area, primarily through grants funded by the National Center for Special Education Research.

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The ABC Kids is a tracing and Phonics app that enables children to recognize letter sounds and blend them to form simple words. It underlines the phonemes associated with each letter through repetition, improving their learning adventure.

Why I think it's useful:

This app is useful for early childhood educators as it contains essential literacy skills during interactive playtime. It changes children's learning paces and enables them to continue their education through the rewards presented in the app. Additionally, it serves as an excellent aid for developing necessary writing skills.

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Looking for a fun, free, and simple educational app to help your toddler learn phonics and trace letters of the alphabet? Look no further than ABC Kids.

ABC Kids is a free phonics and alphabet teaching app that makes learning fun for children, from toddlers all the way to preschoolers and kindergartners. It features a series of tracing games to help kids recognize letter shapes, associate them with phonic sounds, and put their alphabet knowledge to use in fun matching exercises. Any toddler, kindergartener or preschool age child can learn English and the English alphabet simply by following the arrows with their finger. They can even collect stickers and toys as they complete tracing games!

ABC Kids is more than just a kid-friendly educational app, it was designed with adult participation in mind, too. The interface keeps toddlers focused on alphabet reading and writing, tucking menu commands away from moving fingers. Adults can easily access settings to engage Teacher Mode, look at report cards, or toggle tracing and phonics games to better facilitate learning.

Best of all, ABC Kids is full-featured and free from in-app purchases and third party advertisements. Toddlers and adults can enjoy learning together without interruption.

Features:
- A colorful early education app that helps children learn the English alphabet.
- Includes ABC tracing games, phonics pairing, letter matching, and more.
- Uppercase and lowercase letters to trace, listen to, and match.
- Smart interface helps kids focus on phonics and letters without accidentally exiting the game.
- No third party ads, no in-app purchases, no tricks. Just pure educational fun!

Note to Parents:
When creating ABC Kids, we wanted to build the best experience possible for both adults and for children. We're parents ourselves, and we know how paywalls, in-app purchases, and intrusive third party advertisements can detract from the learning experience. With ABC Kids, we put the features of a paid app into a preschool friendly package, leaving out frustrating pop-ups and microtransactions. The end result is exactly the educational experience we want for our children. We think you and your family will enjoy it, too!

- Best wishes from the parents at RV AppStudios

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ABC Kids - Tracing & Phonics - Apps on Google Play

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Looking for a fun, free, and simple educational app to help your toddler learn phonics and trace letters of the alphabet? Look no further than ABC Kids. ABC Kids is a free phonics and alphabet teaching app that makes learning fun for children, from toddlers all the way to preschoolers and kindergartners.

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The Hooked on Phonics is a learn-to-read application that supports children in comprehending letter-sound connections through interactive tools like animated videos, sound games, quizzes, and decodable books for practicing reading.

Why I think it's useful:

The App is a valuable tool for parents and educators aiming to support early literacy development, consisting of various learning styles and making learning enjoyable while learning the solid foundation of reading.

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Hooked on Phonics uses a proven, simple and fun method to give your child a strong foundation in Phonics and reading skills. Each lesson takes 20 minutes or less.

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Teach Your Monster is an app committed to phonics, invented to support children in developing their reading skills by concentrating on areas like letter-sound association, blending sounds, and segmenting words.

Why I think it's useful:

Teach Your Monster's app is useful for its focus on reading, phonics, and comprehension. The games are free for computers and affordable for educators and parents, making them very affordable to use.

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The Phonological Awareness Lab (PAL) is an interactive app designed to enhance children's phonological awareness. Created by a certified speech-language professional, it includes engaging features like the sentence experiment lab, decoding room, rhyming compound, and syllable x-ray.It is suitable for multiple players and can be used for individual and group lessons.

Why I think it's useful:

PAL is a valuable classroom tool that supports multiple learners and can be customized to individual paces. It aligns with the RTI framework, allowing educators to track student data and provide tailored instruction and interventions.

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page-head { border-bottom:none !important; margin: 0 auto 25px!important; padding: 0px 0px!important; width: 910px!important; display:none!important; } Phonological Awareness Lab (PAL) is a fun, multi-level game specifically designed to improve phonological awareness in children. Designed by a certified speech-language pathologist, PAL incorporates a

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Vocabulary encompasses the words an individual comprehends and employs in communication. Learners who have difficulty with vocabulary can gain from unplanned exposure in environments such as home, school, or through reading aloud, whereas deliberate vocabulary instruction focuses on particular words, techniques, and exercises.

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The video describes ways to increase children's vocabulary, such as using words and new words they are unfamiliar with, while the teachers provide assistive technology and visuals to enhance their vocabulary by understanding the word's meaning and how to use it

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How to Promote Vocabulary Skills with Assistive Technology

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LAMP Words for Life is an augmentative communication tool designed for students with ASD and other developmental disabilities. It offers three vocabulary levels—Introductory, Transition, and Full—featuring around 3,000 words, along with Vocabulary Builder and Word Finder to aid language development.

Why I think it's useful:

LAMP Words for Life is beneficial for individuals as it helps children develop verbal speech. Educators can structure vocabulary levels, customize them based on upcoming lessons or activities, and reinforce core vocabulary.

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Starfall focuses on vocabulary building through interactive stories and games that introduce new words in context. It includes pronunciation guides and visual aids to enhance word recognition.

Why I think it's useful:

Building vocabulary is crucial for reading comprehension; therefore, including the app Starfall approach will help students expand their word knowledge, mainly since it includes games and stories they will engage in and improve their language development.

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Starfall Education: Kids Games, Movies, Books & Music for K-5 and above

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At Starfall, children have fun while they learn - specializing in reading, phonics & math - educational games, movies, books, songs, and more for children K-5 and above.

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Lingokids provides over 1,600 interactive activities and games for children. Organized by Oxford University Press, the app ensures high-quality educational content that introduces new vocabulary, including everyday verbs and adjectives, while reinforcing word recognition through auditory learning and improving pronunciation.

Why I think it's useful:

The Lingokids app is useful because it is designed with a vocabulary-rich curriculum to strengthen communication skills by focusing on the vocabulary aspect. It will allow parents to track their child's progress with vocabulary, and the app is relevant to real words by using new word learning.

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Lingokids - The Playlearning™ App in English

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I-Ready is an academic platform allowing students to master reading comprehension: identifying the main idea, analyzing the text, making inferences, and comparing the texts through different types of reading material like fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and informational texts. Therefore, students will obtain direct feedback on their performance, enabling them to correct answers with explanations, and a fun way to motivate them is by earning points or badges after completing tasks.

Why I think it's useful:

I-Ready is helpful for teachers because it will receive the data on each student's performance, and resources can be printed from this application to create direct instruction for students who need additional support or techniques the teacher can review. Another aspect is that the application supports differentiated instruction and builds the foundational and advanced comprehension skills students need to become strategic readers.

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i-Ready Central Resources | Family Center – Home

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On i-Ready Central you’ll find everything you need to be successful with i-Ready, from videos to tips and planning tools.

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Raz-Kids is a comprehensive digital learning platform for students to build a stronger reading foundation. The platform has more than 800 ebooks with 29 levels that will place students into a learning level from A through Z. Students are given the opportunity to listen to the story first and then will encounter an interactive quiz covering their comprehension, focusing on areas like details, main idea, cause and effect sequencing, or making interferences. Due to the multiple exposures of text support, comprehension develops through repetition and practice.

Why I think it's useful:

This digital platform is helpful for every student of different levels. It does not overwhelm the students because it will align with their standards and grade exceptions. Teachers can track individually or by class performance. Encouraging active reading habits through interaction, voice recording, and quiz feedback will promote students' learning skills and understanding of where they are struggling the most before moving on to the next level. Raz-Kids builds a strong comprehension through the consistent practice it provides through the texts and scaffolded support.

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Epic! is a digital library for children ages 12 and under that offers approximately 40,000 books, audiobooks, and videos with various reading levels and student interests. The feature read to me allows text highlighting to aid in understanding the sentence structure and context. Also, it includes quizzes to assess comprehension and reinforce their learning and progress tracking to support literacy development.

Why I think it's useful:

Epic! offers all students a comprehensive and engaging learning experience through the diverse ebooks available, and teachers or parents can monitor their child's reading habits and comprehension development. This way, they can identify what specific areas will need more practice. The platform platforms encourage independent reading, which creates a sense of ownership for the students to learn, which can lead to deeper comprehension skills.

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Between the Lions Early Reading is a multimedia educational program designed to help young students become fluent readers. The program offers online resources, games, and printable materials. Segments like Cliff Hanger repeat specific phrases, assisting students in internalizing word patterns and allowing students to practice fluency through predictability. Along with the read-aloud by characters, provide expressive reading models allowing children to hear natural intonation, rhythm, and pacing to build their reading fluency.

Why I think it's useful:

I think Between the Lions: Early Reading is a useful tool for parents and educators due to the supplement of phonics and guided reading instruction, online games and songs that have repetition and rhythm, along with the high support of ELL students and those with emerging literacy skills by providing visual, audio, and kinesthetic learning opportunities.

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Between the Lions Early Reading | PBS LearningMedia

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Here are segments selected from Between the Lions, the series that helps kids "Get Wild About Reading!" This special collection provides a set of early Reading/Language Arts resources, organized by early elementary and preschool literacy skills.

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Storyline Online is a free web-based literacy platform that produces the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, which supports literacy development in children from preschool through elementary grades. The platform blends celebrity-narrated storybooks and animated illustrations that will bring to life, creating a clear enunciation, expressive tone, pacing, and rhythm, all key elements of developing fluency for students to learn from.

Why I think it's useful:

The Storyline Online is useful for children to hear how fluent reading sounds, such as using natural phrasing, pacing, and expressions and the emphasis the celebrity portrays in their reading. The tool has a combination ofauditory, visual, and linguistic input supporting various learning styles, improving fluency and confidence in literacy.

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MeeGenius! Kids Books is an educational app designed for young children. It has approximately 800 digital children's books, which may include fiction and nonfiction stories. The app has a read-aloud and read-aloud feature highlighting the words for children to connect with the spoken and written versions of reading skills.

Why I think it's useful:

MeeGenius features clear pronunciation, proper pacing, and engaging topics that enhance student motivation and reading stamina, leading to improved fluency over time.Educators or parents can use this resource by downloading the offline books if needed; therefore, it is child-friendly and designed with easy access for children to use at home, in school, or on the go.

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The parents' guide to what's in this app.

Kids can learn about a variety of subjects across lots of genres by reading or listening to many of the more than 400 books on MeeGenius!. Specific learning categories include math, Spanish, social skills, and more. Some also are categorized by age (3-5 or 6-8), which may help emerging readers identify books that best fit their reading levels. By listening to the narrator read and watching the highlighted words track the narrator's voice, kids may improve reading skills and reading speed, as well as increase their subject-specific vocabulary. MeeGenius! is a simple digital library without a ton of interaction, but it's a solid resource for early readers.

The app is mostly easy to use, but the book player is missing some helpful functionality commonly found on similar book apps. When kids choose a book, it takes a few moments to load it to the library and open. Kids can pause narration with a red button that fades in and out of the center of each page. There's no way to interact with text or illustrations, other than by watching the highlighted words in the read-to-me option.

There are currently only a few free stories on this app; most other books are available with in-app purchases only ($4.99 monthly subscription). Some books, labeled "premium" titles, such as Dr. Seuss books, are in-app purchases for individual books. For example, Go, Dog. Go! must be purchased for $9.99. It may not be immediately clear to younger kids which books are available and which require further purchase. The monthly subscription will renew automatically unless canceled.

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Splat-O-Nym is an app that enhances students' vocabulary skills via gameplay. The app concentrates on training students to use synonyms, antonyms, and contextual word meanings, and it's a fast-paced review to support previous learning words with auditory aid for pronunciation.

Why I think it's useful:

The Splat-O-Nym is helpful for grades 1-8 to strengthen their word knowledge and improve their emerging reading stage. Once students log in, they will be exposed to targeting words multiple times across the different games and levels. This way, it reinforces their vocabulary knowledge. Since the app is fast-paced, students will be required to recall and improve their long-term retention skills. The application will be helpful for teachers or parents by monitoring performance and could be used for independent study time.

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Splat-O-Nym is an engaging, independent vocabulary game that helps students learn synonyms and antonyms through four fun activities: Synonym Splat,... | By One Minute Reader | Facebook

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Splat-O-Nym is an engaging, independent vocabulary game that helps students learn synonyms and antonyms through four fun activities: Synonym Splat,...

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The Sound-Write app assists early literacy by utilizing a phonics approach to guide children in connecting phonemes and graphemes. Therefore, it concentrates on blending, segmenting, and phoneme manipulation.

Why I think it's useful:

The Sound-Write app concentrates on phonics, allowing children to become fluent readers and assured spellers. It's an excellent resource for early learners, struggling readers, and those with dyslexia, offering engaging, game-like phonics instruction that supports students motivated.

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The Initial Code by Sounds-Write app follows the Sounds-Write Initial Code sequence and provides a variety of activities to develop students' skills in the following areas:

Blending and segmenting

Word reading and writing

Sentence reading and writing

The app is available on the Apple App Store ( for use on iPads only with iOS12 or later). The free version of the app provides a sample of activities, with the full version available as an in-app purchase.

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The Initial Code by Sounds-Write app follows the Sounds-Write Initial Code sequence and provides a variety of activities to develop students' skills in the following areas: Blending and segmenting Word reading and writing Sentence reading and writing The app is available on the Apple App Store ( for use on iPads only with iOS12 or later).