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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.