In this instructional video, Winnie White, a self‑contained classroom teacher for grades 2‑4, shares concrete strategies for teaching phonics to non‑speaking students and those who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices. She emphasizes the foundational need for regulation—identifying sensory supports such as beads, weighted blankets, or headphones—to enable students to engage in phonics tasks. White outlines a series of adaptable, multisensory activities: monthly themed lessons that integrate social‑studies content; a color‑coded bead system for segmenting consonant‑vowel‑consonant (CVC) and multisyllabic words; a letter‑vs‑number coloring exercise; syllable‑clapping and counting drills; and explicit digraph instruction. She demonstrates how students use AAC devices and the Accessible Literacy Learning (ALL) app on Tobii Dynavox to select sounds, construct words, and receive feedback. Throughout, she reflects on adapting standard phonics curricula to meet the unique motor and communication needs of non‑speakers, drawing on 28 years of teaching experience. The video concludes with encouragement to educators to adopt these sample activities, adapt curricula with fidelity, and explore further resources on The Autism Helper channel.
Chapters
Let's talk a little bit about teaching phonics to non-speaking students and students who use AAC devices. My name is Winnie White, and I am currently teaching in a self-contained classroom for grades 2 through 4. I've had some of these same students from kindergarten, so I just want to give you some samples of some things that I've done over the years that have really made a big impact on their systematic approach to teaching phonics and and therefore how it has really helped our reading instruction. So there are a few things I'd like for you to know about teaching non-speaking students phonics. It can be very challenging, and because it can be very challenging, I, I want to encourage you to work very hard to help your students with regulation. With non-speaking autism or other forms of non-speaking, I think it's important to understand that they do not have the body the eye control that makes it very difficult for them to be able to do the things that we're asking them to do. So spend some time with your student, get to know your student. What helps your student regulate? What helps make them happy? What helps get them in the learning mode? And you know what? That takes time to learn, whether it is something such as beads like you'll see my student do, or or the understanding that they're going to get some time with their cards that they may love to touch and feel, or it could be a squeezy or a weighted blanket or headphones. Whatever your student needs, do your very best to help meet those needs to help them regulate in order to help them do some pretty hard things. This is something that I did every month that went along with the theme of the month. For my theme for September, I would do community helpers and job ideas. I would utilize things that would vary for students who are just learning phonemic awareness and then students who were more advanced in their phonemic awareness. As you can see, I included the CH and the EN in this because I felt like it would meet the needs of some of my students who were already reading and understood all of the basic letters of the alphabet and what their sounds were. The This was very easy to make. I just made a PowerPoint. You could use Google Slides as well. I used the letter. I thought about what would work in that situation for that month, for that theme. And sometimes I would do a Google search to find out different jobs or different words that went along with that so that I could make sure every single letter had a picture that went with it. So that it also was part of my social studies unit. I'm always thinking about ways to integrate. Here's another example of an activity that I like to do. I think it's great for making it very concrete how to segment sounds and for students who are non-speaking to be able to, be able to touch. I know research says to just go ahead and use all of one color, But I think it's important to know in my classroom I have to adapt according to the needs of my students, and I'm really trying to reinforce the difference between consonants and vowels. So I think the different colors really helps in that. If they were to pick a word, we'll just start with a simple CVC word, a consonant-vowel-consonant word. For cup, we would go /k/ /u/ /p/. I'm going to show you how my student with an AAC device uses that. I also want to show you how it would look differently for a student who is more advanced and ready for 2-syllable words. Music. I would add the I and the C to it, and I would work with them on breaking up the sounds. Mmm, you sick. And use their AAC device if I need to. Let's go to your phonics page. This is a new skill for us, so go to phonics. Yes, you may touch your beads. And we can do that later. Yes. Nope, we're not going to count. We're going to go to phonics. So if you'll go to phonics and let's sound it out. It does start with a B. The vowel is E like egg. Eh. So you're gonna go to your yellow vowels and you're gonna find the eh. Uh-huh. And then let's do that last sound. What do you hear? Buh-ed. Buh-ed. Nice. Awesome. Do the cup next. Bead. Yes, you can touch your beads. Now go to your phonics page and ready to push and sound out. Get nice and regulated. That's wonderful. And she's ready. Our vowel is the red one. Uh, uh. Go to your yellow vowels right here, the short vowels. And you're listening for /uh/. /k/ /uh/ /p/. What do you hear at the end? /k/. That's right, good job. Now we're going to do, oh, it starts with a /d/. /d/. It's not a /b/. It's very close, very close. /d/. Dip. Uh-huh. And here's our vowel, uh. Uh. Uh. You accidentally got two uh's. Can you backspace? Excellent. And this is one of our digraphs we've been studying about. It makes the /k/ sound at the end of the word after a short vowel. It would be ck. Can you add that K?
Duck.
Very good. D-uck. Duck. Let's talk about our new phonics program. As you know the difference between letters and numbers, you already know A through Z, and you already know 1 through 9. Now, can you color just the letters? What would you like to color with? Would you like to color with markers or with crayons? What would you choose? You want to choose a marker? Okay, so you're just going to color the letters. So it would be A, E, I, O, U, all the way down to Z. All right, let's start with that first box. Is that a— is that a letter? Then you color it. And stop. Let's look at this. Is this a letter or a number? Hmm, that to me looks like a number. So if we go to "and," we can find the word "count," and over here is the word "number." Number, that's right. So we're not going to color the number, but look right here, there's a letter. If we go to "my," Oh no, actually I think it's read. I'm not sure. I'm looking for that word letter. We found it before in the past. Let's see, it might be under my. You can write a letter. It's not there. So remember, if we don't know where something is, we can go to find. L-E-T-T-E-R. Oh, there it is, Cindy Kay! Do you see it? Letter. It wasn't read. It was in materials. Yes. Letter. Yes. So Z is a letter, and you can color the Z. Yes, we can do the cat game after this.
Card.
Uh-huh. We can do the cat cards. So you're going to color that Z, and then you're going to— that's a circle. This is a color. And then stop. Look at the number 3. Oops, I gave you the answer. 3 is a, go to Anne. What is 3? Number. It's a number, we're not gonna color it. But look at this. That is an, it looks like an uppercase O. Mm-hmm. Because this down here looks like a lowercase o to me. They're matching, upper and lower. Our next section says we're going to listen to the sounds and then we're gonna draw a line to match the letter to the sound. All right, let's start with this sound. Eh, eh. Draw a line to the letter that makes the eh sound. Shh, shh. Ooh, very good. Listen to this letter. Rrr. Draw a line to the letter that makes the sound. Very good. Now this is brand new. We've never really done this before. Circle the number of syllables in each word. But syllables are very important for helping us segment words. Uh-huh, very good. Now put your marker down. Look at our anchor chart. It's teaching us that syllables are sounds that you hear in a word. It is a chair. Very good. And I'm going to clap it out. Chair. One clap, one syllable. What is this? Book. It is a book. And listen, book, one clap, book. All right, now let's do pencil. Pencil, two parts, pencil. Let's do apple, apple. You have to actually count your claps for each part of the word to know how many syllables are in it. Let's try it right here with a sandwich. Listen to me count. Sandwich. How many claps were there? There were 2 claps. Now let's do tractor. Ready to clap out tractor? Tractor. How many times? Very good, 2 syllables. Now let's listen to the word slide. Let's see how many times I tap the board. Slide. How many times? It was just 1 time. Fantastic! You're catching on to those syllables so quickly. If you've watched another one of my videos before on nonverbal reading strategies, you've seen me utilize ALL app. That's Accessible Literacy Learning app. Tobii Dynavox puts this out.
I am going to say a sound. Listen to the sound. Then look at the letters and point to the letter that makes that sound.
Ah, ah. Very good, very good.
You're right.
Ah. This is a great way, animals, to assess phonics learning.
I'm going to say a sound. Listen to the sound, then look at the letters and point to the letter that makes That's down.
Okay, stamp. Oh, that was fast. Fit. Fit.
Bad.
Bad. Hat. Hat. And top. All right, so let's go over those words again.
Point to the picture.
Okay, ready? Listen. This is fit, bad, hat, and top. Now sound it out in your head. Oh yeah, girl, you got it!
You're right.
Nice. I also want to make sure you understand that this is not a comprehensive video for teaching phonics to non-speaking students. This is just a sample of activities and things that you can do to help build phonemic awareness and to help build phonics skills in their students, in your students, and some strategies that you can start with today. I hope these examples have helped you in knowing how to take your phonetic curriculum and to adapt it to the needs of your non-speaking students. They can learn so much. They can read. They can grow in their love for reading, but We really need to get this right. We really need to get this phonics system correct for them and give them the assistive technology that they need in order to be a success. It's not easy. I've been teaching for 28 years, and of those 28 years, most of it was in the general curriculum. And I would take on phonetics programs, take on reading programs that the district had adopted. I would learn those, go through training with those, and then I would administer it with fidelity But when I stepped into this classroom, that was different because I was working with students who could not do all the things that the curriculum talked about because they were non-speaking. So we have to learn how to adapt the curriculum to meet those needs, and there's so much that they can do with the correct support. Check out more videos right here on The Autism Helper on how to meet the needs of your non-speakers and your AAC users.
