Idiom books: A treasure to children with Autism.

If you don’t already know, children who have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) struggle with figurative language. Idioms, hyperboles, and metaphors are harder to comprehend even more than irony and sarcasm. The social use of language is already very challenging for them, so imagine adding to that, sentences and expressions that don’t match the literal meaning.

This is why parents and teachers need to highly consider teaching figurative language at an early age in order to support the understanding of an everyday social conversation, which will result in an increase of participation in social situations as well as lower anxiety.

As a former Special Education teacher, I know there are not too many resources that target this subject out there, and this is why I am so glad I came across this series of books from languagelizard.com, that specifically focuses on teaching idioms. These books seem to be perfectly designed to the way that the ASD brain learns, it provides detailed examples of the idioms, along with the definition and a visual representation.

Example: “Once in a blue moon” - something that happens very rarely - ex. “My mother bakes lotus blossom cookies once in a blue moon”.

And, to add more value to this resource, the books are very appropriate for English Language Learners (ELL). Besides the English version, they come in other bilingual editions where the idiom and meaning is also provided in the child’s second language, and the illustrations provide lots of opportunities to see their culture represented.

The set contains four books, “The Lion's Share: English Animal Idioms, “Icing on the Cake: English Food Idioms”, “With Flying Colors: English Color Idioms” and “Fresh as a Daisy: English Nature Idioms”. Each book comes with English audio of the book, lesson plans that teach idioms while exposing children to other cultures, fun idiom activities for use in the classroom or home, and other downloadable resources.

Language Lizard Idiom books are the whole golden package. It is very rare to find children's literature that is designed to help children with Special Needs and even harder to find resources that target both, Special Needs and English language learners. This is why this set of books are a treasure and a must have in every parent, and educator’s bookshelf.

This is a formal review and the opinions expressed are purely my own.