Is Your Child Struggling to Read?

Resistance to reading can be such a struggle for parents, especially if you are a parent who loves to read!

Sometimes we scratch our heads and wonder what to do!

I have a few quick tips you can try to use and see if you can discover WHY your child is struggling.

1.) Choose a text your child is interested in reading. It can be a library book, a book from Epic, or a book you have at home on your book shelf.

2.) Talk about the book and do a basic overview of the book. You can explore the book cover, read the back of the book page or the front depending on where you can find details, you can look at the pictures.

3.) You can begin the reading of the book and then ask your child to read. Be sure your child is reading OUT LOUD.

4.) Pay attention to your child as they read.

Are they: running sentences together and stopping at strange places, making substitutions, forgetting the endings to words, or skipping words?

These are ALL COMMON signs of a child who may be a struggling reader.

What you are going to want to do is praise your child on their efforts and find something you thought they did well. Then you can decide if you want to discuss what didn't go well.

Personally, if you are on a fact finding mission, I would omit this portion. I would take the information you discovered and begin to formulate a plan of action for improving your child's reading.

It may sound strange for a parent to hear that their child is a struggling reader. But, many children are. It is WHAT you DO with that information that will make a BIG difference!

When a student is running sentences together and making stops at strange places, it may be that the child simply doesn't understand the purpose of punctuation. You can find time to go back over the meanings of those signs and then model how good readers use them. Have your child practice once you have read the material out loud to them. It is OKAY to come back to the same text several days in a row. Keep modeling and keep having your child practice. Once they get really good, ask them if they want you to do a recording of it. Have them listen to their reading. They may be delighted to hear how great they sound.

If your child is a reader who omits words, makes substitutions, or doesn't include the endings on words, your child may need to take a few steps back and work on their phonics. We tend to believe our children can read well because they have gone to school. They are supposed to learn how to read in the time they are given in their classroom. For some kids, this simply cannot happen. They need more time, more repetitions, and they need direct instruction with detailed steps in how to decode words. Taking the time to teach your child the sounds within words will help them tackle unknown words.

This is not a "magic pill" that will solve their problem immediately, but if you take the time to gradually keep introducing sounds to them, they will eventually improve. I would incorporate spelling practice along with the decoding. This way you are using mulitple modalities to cement the sounds in their brains.

I know that for many of my students, sharing new sounds with them and then reviewing them at our lessons makes a huge impact on their ability to read and to write.

This article cannot cover everything that it takes to make a great reader, but these simple tips may get you headed in the right direction!

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