How to help a 5th grader ASD with reading comprehension

[Anonymous]

I have a level 2 ASD who is struggling so much with reading comprehension. math and English are ok. Anything that worked?

[Anonymous]

Is he getting speech and language therapy. Working on "taking on the perspective of others" is critical to reading comprehension.

[Anonymous]

My ASD son was a solid technical reader at that age, but he struggled to understand character motivations and unwritten hints, which are called inferences. His school's SLP, who had worked a lot with him on speech and social skills, recommended workbooks called Inference Jones. They're excellent. You can buy them on Amazon, or on the website called Critical Thinking Co, which has a ton of workbooks for kids. We also used their math and general reading comprehension workbooks.

I also "narrated" his day and used storytelling and movies/TV series as a continuation of his learning of hints and cues and un-explicit directions. I would stop reading the book, or pause the movie, to ask him what he understood from a situation, and then add any inference or extra level of understanding that he had missed. And at that age, he missed a lot of it!

It paid off over the years. Now he's an adult, and even though he's very asocial and has significant problems with low processing speed and inattention... he can usually discern what he needs to do in any given situation, in terms of socio-emotional responses to other people and the context. Even as a teen, this was difficult for him. So there's hope!