Laying the Foundation: Navigating Early Reading Struggles for Lifelong Literacy

Reading is a highly complex activity that involves and changes the entire brain. Learning to read even helps the brain function.

Children learning to read need to master visual cues, synthesize auditory information, and create pictures in their head. Given how complicated this is, it is amazing that any humans can read at all, let alone children as young as three or four. 

Yet not all children learn to read at the same pace. For some young students, reading is a highly difficult task, and they struggle with reading early. This is where the benefit of positive interaction and input on the part of adults can make a marked difference.

Early reading struggles don’t have to be permanent, but they do need to be addressed quickly to help your student get caught up. If a child has reading problems in first grade, there is a 90 percent chance that they will continue to have problems in fourth grade.

Making sure that your student learns to read is one of the most important goals for an educator. A young child’s early reading skills are a strong indicator of future career and academic success.

Early difficulty with reading could be a sign of a broader cognitive problem, such as dyslexia. Or it could just be because everyone learns to read at a different pace. Either way, there is plenty that parents and teachers can do to help overcome the difficulty.

Early Reading Struggles: Signs and Symptoms

Reading is a complex skill that is learned in separate phases. Students may struggle with different reading tasks at different ages. 

Preschool to Kindergarten

This is a crucial time for a child’s reading development because it marks the foundational stage of literacy acquisition. During these formative years, children’s brains are primed for language learning, and they acquire essential pre-reading skills like phonemic awareness and letter recognition. Here are the important signs to look out for when it comes to early reading struggles at this stage:

• Speech issues
• Trouble identifying letter and number symbols
• Difficulty recognizing rhyming patterns

Kindergarten to First Grade

Reading development at this stage is all about honing the foundational skills and moving toward more advanced literacy. During these formative years, children build upon their phonemic awareness and letter recognition skills learned in preschool and kindergarten and start to apply them to read more complex texts. This period is when they transition from learning to read individual words to comprehending sentences and stories. During this important period, these trouble spots can indicate broader reading issues:

• Struggle associating sounds and letters
• Skipping words in sentences
• Failure to self-correct errors
• Guessing at words instead of sounding them out
• Sounding out the same word over whenever it is encountered

These issues relate to the more complex tasks of analyzing and organizing all the little pieces of language together, both written and spoken.

When you think about it, there’s no particular reason why the shape of the letter “A” should have anything to do with its sound. Learning to read involves memorizing a high number of completely arbitrary associations.

From first grade on students may struggle with reading comprehension and staying focused. These are high-level issues concerning control of attention and the actual content of a text.

Most students will face every one of these problems at some point, so don’t be alarmed if you notice one or two of them as you learn to read. Even the best readers may have occasional difficulty sounding out a new word. On the other hand, recurring difficulties over an extended period of time could be a sign that there is an issue.

The Impact of Untreated Reading Difficulties

Reading holds significant importance in a child’s cognitive development, serving as a fundamental skill that plays a pivotal role in various aspects of their academic journey. It supports them in tasks like written assessments, quizzes, homework completion, and understanding textbooks. Learning to read also significantly contributes to a child’s self-esteem, academic progress, and overall well-being, representing one of the more intricate challenges they face at this age. Success in reading serves as a meaningful personal milestone, helping them realize their potential for mastering complex skills in the future.

It’s worth noting that as children often learn to read alongside their peers, some may notice if their reading skills differ from those of their classmates. This awareness could potentially lead to feelings of inferiority and affect their motivation to take on future tasks, which, in turn, might result in additional performance challenges.

The Role of Early Intervention

Addressing a child’s early reading struggles can go a long way. There are several assessments that professionals may give to determine the source of the problem. Once the source of the issue is identified, certain remedies and strategies can be introduced. Keep these common issues and solutions in mind: 

• A diagnosable cognitive problem like ADHD or dyslexia often can be treated with medication and one-on-one support. 
• Sometimes a child simply falls on the lower end of the reading skills spectrum. In this case, a little extra push can help them become competent readers more quickly.
• In other cases, a child’s reading difficulties may be due to something else, such as an undiagnosed visual or auditory impairment. Assessment for binocular vision dysfunction should be made early to support the student in their reading efforts.  While manifesting symptoms similar to dyslexia, eye-teaming issues usually have a resolvable cause.

If a young child can improve reading skills early, this will have positive effects down the road. They will have increased confidence in their academic abilities and reduced frustration in carrying out other, non-reading tasks.

Supporting Your Child’s Reading Development

All academic success, especially reading, begins at home. Even just reading bedtime stories to children helps them develop vocabulary and listening comprehension.

Some practices you can adopt include:

• Reading books together. Studies show that nursery rhymes serve a very important purpose in helping a young reader emerge. As skills develop, you can take turns reading words, sentences, or paragraphs. 
• Sounding out words together, letter by letter. Doing this together can help your child’s confidence in sounding out words. Programs like Spelling You See are designed to help students with the sound-to-letter correspondences that help reading skills develop.
• Playing word games. Games like Bingo and Go Fish help develop vocabulary.
• Discussing word meanings. For older students, you can even discuss word origins, such as Latin roots.
• Pointing out new, interesting, or unfamiliar words. Identifying unusual-looking or complex words will help your student work through common letter groupings and sounds. 
• Asking questions. Before, during, and after reading ask your student questions to help reinforce comprehension skills.

Reading Skills Start at Home

Reading is one of, if not the, most important early cognitive skills that humans learn. Long before your child can study history, program a computer, or solve calculus problems, they need to develop a solid reading foundation.

Many students experience early reading struggles, but this doesn’t have to be a permanent problem. In most cases, early intervention can help correct this, so that children can rapidly become better readers.

Done properly, early intervention will help improve your child’s self-esteem and lay the bedrock for future reading and academic success.

To learn more about early reading struggles, check out this important episode of The Demme Learning Show, where host Gretchen Roe chats with Amanda Capps and Kathleen Calabrese about what parents can do to boost their children’s reading confidence and foster academic success.