Literacy lifts children with Down syndrome socially

Apart from an improved aptitude for learning, literacy helps children with Down syndrome by building self-esteem and confidence to interact socially.

A literacy pod at GiGi's Playhouse NYC where children with Down syndrome learn to read together.

Five-year-old Aedan pointed to each word and read them aloud: “I go to school.” The words were printed in a five-page book he had been working on once a week for the last eight months at GiGi’s Playhouse NYC, a Down syndrome awareness and literacy center in Manhattan.

The level-one book was created specifically for Aedan to help him learn to read despite developmental delays due to his low muscle tone, a common challenge for children with Down syndrome. Part of the goal is to get him to become more verbal, a skill that has been proven to be enhanced by reading, according to “Teaching Children with Down Syndrome to Read,” a 1993 published research article authored by Sue Buckley and Gillian Bird. Additionally, the ability to read allows people to actively contribute and participate in the world.

“Education empowers all children. We educate children because we want them to have the pleasure of deciphering the world,” says Jordana Mendelson, Aedan’s mother and the volunteer education director at GiGi’s Playhouse NYC.

Today the Global Down Syndrome Foundation states that early physical and speech therapies for babies with Down syndrome can make a major difference in a child’s physical and intellectual development, yet it is the least funded genetic condition by the National Institute of Health.

“A major misconception is that many think it’s not possible—that [children with Down syndrome] don’t have the intellectual capacity to learn,” says Jessica Cha, Aedan’s tutor, who has a bachelor’s in early childhood special education from New York University and is now studying literacy for special learners also at NYU. “But there are different ways of teaching, and it’s possible to reach an end goal.”

Traditionally, reading is taught through phonics, where students learn the alphabet first, then move to words, and finally to phonics. In the case of a child with special needs who may be severely speech delayed, sounding a word out may not be the best method.

Instead, for children with Down syndrome, who tend to be visual learners, a different method that focuses on pairing images with words has proven to be successful.

“We know that kids with Down syndrome typically learn to read between 5 years and 5 months to 10 years old. Learning to read is very complex, and part of the dilemma for our kids with Down syndrome is that they have less than half the exposure to print than your ‘typical’ kids,” says Patty McVay, the director of education at the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome based in Colorado and funded by the Global Down Syndrome Foundation. “What also plays a very big role is the belief of what children with Down syndrome can achieve.”