For many children, learning to read is a struggle. The child may experience subsequent difficulty with spelling and writing. Difficulty with reading and writing can impede academic success and also impact self esteem. It is important to know how to help your child and when to be concerned about learning or reading disabilities.
Reading disabilities affect close to 20% of the population, the most common being Dyslexia. There are many excellent tools for identifying kindergarten children at risk for reading difficulty. Research has demonstrated that the earlier the intervention for reading disabilities, the better the outcomes in reading performance as children progress academically.
Learning to read follows a developmental sequence. Children in preschool begin to associate printed words with spoken words. They recognize it’s the print, not the pictures in books that tell the words in a story. Soon a child will begin to understand the relationship between letters, sounds and words. A child needs to develop phonemic or sound awareness. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds. Children with good phonemic awareness understand rhyming, sound blending and sound segmenting. A child must also demonstrate phonological memory in order to be able to store and retrieve this type of information about sounds and letters. Without these fundamental skills, learning to read will be a struggle.
A mastery and sequential approach to phonics is beneficial for beginning readers. There are many books that are accessible to parents for working on these skills at home. One such book is “The Reading Lesson” by Michael Leven, M.D. and Charan Langton, M.S.. It contains twenty structured phonics lessons to help children learn to read. The “Bob Books” series of beginning readers by Scholastic is a great sequential series of books to help reinforce these early phonics skills.
If a child, despite a thorough and sequential instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics continues to struggle, they should be evaluated for a reading disability. A child should be assessed in both cognitive and academic achievement domains using formal standardized testing procedures. Regardless of the ultimate label, learning to read and write is an integral part of learning and academic achievement. A good evaluation will identify both areas of strengths and weaknesses, provide recommendations for intervention as well as identify specific strategies that may help your child learn to read and spell more efficiently.
Lowry Speech Therapy (303) 360-0727