Martha:  Somebody asked, “What was your educational experience with your son?” I just mentioned briefly the challenges we faced with him as having severe autism and being profoundly nonverbal. Basically what we had to do with my son was homeschool him, because he was very severe, and we could see that the knowledge resources were not available in our local school system. So we went through the whole gamut. We did Applied Behavior Analysis. I had an excellent Verbal Behavior consultant for a few years. Then we moved for academics into Direct Instruction programs, Precision Teaching and then TAGteach.

I’d like to mention a little bit more about Direct Instruction. For those of you who don’t know, Direct Instruction is a body of academic curricula developed by Dr. Siegfried Engelmann. Direct Instruction (DI) has 40+ years of research validation in providing superior learning outcomes to all learners, whatever their socio-economic background or disability background may be. The reason it’s so successful is because it is based on scientific principles of human learning – the same things that we use in ABA and TAGteach. Direct Instruction breaks down the academic goals into such tiny slices that I was able to use it successfully with my severe son.

Direct Instruction is highly compatible with TAGteach because, once the learning task is broken down, the correct response is your tag point. So, for example, in beginning reading, the first letter that’s taught in Direct Instruction reading is the letter M. It is not introduced as M, it is pointed out, and the instructor says, “This sound is mmm.” Then the next task for the child is to say mmm. So there you have your tag point. The tag point is “Say mmm.”  As soon as the child does it, you tag it. There’s a great website on this. We can include this information.

There is an excellent reading instruction book published by Dr. Siegfried Engelmann for parents. It is entitled Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons.  This reading program takes any person, no matter the age, from being a non-reader to reading on the second-grade level. It’s a beautiful exposition of breaking down the sounding out, segmenting, blending, and rhyming tasks that are essential for reading English. There is also a computer-based program, a Direct Instruction reading program, called Funnix Beginning Reading; also Funnix Beginning Math. The Funnix organization makes these available for free downloads once per year. They are not that expensive anyway. The Funnix programs cost about $40 each, and the Teach Your Child To Read book costs about $25.  So these are inexpensive, very effective, brilliantly designed programs that are easy for parents to use.   

In my son’s program, once we moved out of the ABA and VB skills, we did Direct Instruction Reading Mastery, Language for Learning, the DISTAR Arithmetic series, and Connecting Math Concepts. We’ll include some information about Direct Instruction and related websites.

So that was the story of my son’s education. I homeschooled him for fifteen years. This past September we enrolled him in public school. He’s very happy in a program for 18-21 year old learners with autism. He’s doing very well.