Back to School - Strategies to help with reading struggles
Reading is a passport to many adventures
-Mary Pope Osborne
If you are a parent who has a child who struggles with reading, you may wish you had a few more strategies up your sleeve to help them (we could all benefit from extra tools in our toolbox, right?!). We know that reading skills are important for all aspects of our school and personal lives. Whether your child has dyslexia or another issue with reading, there are lots of different ways to support them through the struggle.
What is important to first understand is that when your child is struggling with reading, there are different parts of reading that may be causing the issue.
Some children struggle with DECODING (Phonological Processing) which is when they struggle with sounding out written words, or when they struggle to map letters to the sounds that they make.
Some children struggle with COMPREHENSION which is related to understanding what they read.
Some children struggle with FLUENCY (Orthographic Processing) where they may have issues related to how quickly or accurately they are reading, and whether they are using the right expression.
There are not formal subtypes of dyslexia, however, people with dyslexia struggle with different parts of reading, and often in more than one area above. Just like all learning differences, learning disabilities in reading will not look exactly the same for each child. There are many factors that affect reading ability and each child’s experience will be unique (this can sometimes make it feel even more challenging for parents - as much as we sometimes wish that there were, there is not a manual of step by step instructions for how to help your child!).
However, learning differences in reading are actually quite common, with the International Dyslexia Association suggesting that “as many as 15-20% of the population as a whole have some of the symptoms of dyslexia, including slow or inaccurate reading, poor spelling, poor writing, or mixing up similar words. Not all of these will qualify for special education, but they are likely to struggle with many aspects of academic learning”.
So what do we do when we know that our children are struggling with reading? Consulting a psychologist to receive some formal recommendations around your specific child’s needs is definitely something we recommend if you have any concerns. They will be able to tell you what specific aspects of reading are presenting as problematic for your child. This detailed information about YOUR child can be incredibly insightful.
In the meantime, we know you likely want to do SOMETHING. It is hard to watch our kids struggle. There are some informal activities that you can do to help your child practice at home. A love of reading will go a long way, so try to make it fun while working on some of these different letter-sound awareness skills:
To practice first and last sounds: A sound scavenger hunt activity.
This could be done with kids needing to go and bring you an object, or with a camera, they could take a picture of an object to show you! To gameify it even further, you could make it a team race between family members and get parents involved too! For example:
Find me something that begins with the /b/ sound
Find me something that ends with the /d/ sound
To practice breaking apart words and putting words together: I spy sounds
This could be done by choosing an item around the room and then breaking the word up into sound parts. The child has to find the item by putting the sounds back together to make the word. For example:
BOOK - /b/ /uu/ /k/
CAR - /k/ /a/ /r/
To practice playing with sounds in words: Sounds mix-up
This could be done by taking sounds off of words and replacing them with new sounds - while reading a book, or just orally while driving in the car or at the dinner table! For example:
What would happen if we took the /d/ from duck and replaced it with a /l/ sound instead? What word would we have?
What would happen if we took the /at/ away from cat and replaced it with /ab/ instead? What would the new word be?
There are many ways that we can support our kids with learning to read, or improving their skills in reading. We are adding new resources each week to our Back to School Series. Check out this week’s FREE downloads of activity sheets based on the activities above, or check out some of our other resources of reading and executive function checklists.
Looking for more information about Dyslexia and reading?
Read this blog article: What is Dyslexia