How to help a child with reading difficulties

Wondering how to help a child with reading difficulties? You can help a struggling reader with the 8 simple steps in this post.

Maybe you had a parent-teacher conference. Maybe the reading time tantrums have just become too much.

You’re wondering, “how can I help my child read better?” Well, you’re in the right place.

I know what it feels like to want to help your child with reading difficulties. During the pandemic, I started to notice the signs with my first-grade daughter.

In second grade she was diagnosed with dyslexia. Her school was using a balanced literacy approach with no systematic reading instructions.

So I had to get to work. I took her reading and writing lessons into my own hands.

Regardless of dyslexia or not, these are the eight steps I recommend you take to help your child with reading difficulties.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. I might make a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Can struggling readers catch up?

Absolutely – struggling readers can catch up. While the ideal time to help a struggling reader is kindergarten or first grade, it is NEVER too late. Even adults can learn to read with the correct support.

But most children with reading difficulties will not just catch up on their own. 90% of struggling readers in first grade continue to struggle in 4th grade. So if anyone says your child with reading difficulties is a late bloomer, they are almost certainly wrong.

Now do not beat yourself up over starting “too late.” You need a mindset of commitment – not shame.

The most important thing is you start now. I will give you manageable steps to help your struggling reader catch up.

help a child with reading difficulties in 8 steps

These are the 8 steps I recommend to help your child with reading difficulties or a reading disability. They are the same steps I’ve used with my dyslexic child and hundreds of struggling readers.

These steps will help 95% of children learn to read, struggling readers or typical learners:

1. Improve your understanding of English
2. Start with phonemic awareness skills
3. Assess your child
4. Teach phonics step-by-step
5. Connect reading and spelling
6. Read decodable text
7. Review, review, review
8. Listen to audiobooks

Step 1: Improve your understanding of english

The first step starts with you! Whether you’re a seasoned teacher or a parent with no teaching experience, you need to improve your understanding of English.

We never learned this in elementary school, so be patient with yourself.

Written English is a code of 44 speech sounds represented by combinations of 26 letters. The sounds are called phonemes and the letters are called graphemes.

Check out the blog post Phonics Sounds List to learn the 44 sounds and grab a free printable chart.

If you find you need more help, I teach you how to pronounce the 44 phonemes and the most common ways to read and spell them in Sounds School.

Step 2: Start with Phonemic Awareness Skills

When most children struggle to read, there is a weakness in phonological awareness and phonemic awareness skills.

In short, their brains have a really hard time connecting speech sounds to written words.

Why does this matter? We think of reading as a visual thing we do with our eyes.

The truth is reading is code-breaking. Written words represent spoken words. Those letters represent speech sounds.

Your child needs the ability to hear individual sounds sounds. Then they need to be able to put them back together as words when sounding out words phonetically.

Step 3: Assess your child

When deciding how to help a child with reading difficulties The third step is to assess your child’s phonics skills. This means figuring out what your child does and doesn’t know.

You don’t want to waste time on things they already know and you don’t want to leave gaps.

Don’t let the word assess scare you. It just means tracking mistakes so you know what to teach.

You can DIY this. Listen to your child read a simple book aloud. Write down any errors they make.

Look at those errors and group them by phonics skills. Let’s say your child has trouble with these words:

• tape
• yam
• slope
• stand

These words show a parent their child needs a quick review of some CVC Words like “yam,” help with CVCE Words and Consonant Blends.

If you want a print-and-go way to assess your child’s skills, you can grab these Phonics Assessments in Sounds School. You will have a complete understanding of what your child already knows and needs to learn.

Step 4: Teach Phonics Step-by-Step

Once you have an understanding of where to start with your child, you can begin to teach phonics step-by-step.

While there is no one agreed-upon sequence for phonics, a general rule of thumb is:

• letter sounds
• CVC words
• consonant digraphs and blends
• CVCE words
• simple two-syllable words
• consonant patterns
• bossy r vowels
• long vowel teams
• vowel diphthongs
• prefixes and suffixes

The Phonics Fun Big Bundle is a great resource to work on phonics sequentially. Plus your child will beg for more!

Step 5: Connect to spelling

I often see parents and teachers treating spelling as a different subject than reading. Even adults make jokes about being terrible spellers.

But reading and writing are interconnected in the brain. To help a child with reading difficulties, you need to connect phonics to spelling.

So as you have your child learn to read a phonics pattern, you also want them to practice spelling words and sentences with them.

This can. be pretty easy. Just grab a spiral notebook.

Grab your phonics word list. It can come from the Sounds and Spelling ebook inside Sounds School, or you can use the games from Phonics Fun Big Bundle as a word list.

Dictate the words to your child like you’re giving a traditional spelling test.

Then make up a sentence using a word of two.

Let’s say your skill is the bossy r vowel ar. You can dictate these words:

• art
• barn
• star

Then make up a sentence like “I ride in my car to the farm.”

Use your spiral notebook for review with your child. They can go back and read their dictated words and sentences.

This cements the phonics patterns in their memory for both reading and spelling.

Step 6: Read Decodable Text

Decodable texts are books or passages where children can sound out most of the words. Often they are based on a specific phonics skill.

You want your child to read words they’ve been taught so they apply what they know and do not guess.

Research hasn’t told us what is the best amount of decodable words in a text. Some people recommend 100% but there is no evidence base for that. I recommend around 90% as long as your child is reading aloud to you.

For younger children, I cannot recommend Charge into Reading‘s decodable readers strongly enough. They focus on phonics skills from short vowels to complex spelling patterns.

Spencer at Toddlers Can Read also has great decodable books for children at the absolute beginning. They are more focused on the number of sounds than the phonics patterns.

I would have a hard time using them with older children (2nd grade and up) who are already embarrassed. He plans to write books for older kids so stay tuned for those!

I love and use the decodable one-page stories from The Literacy Nest. The drawback is they can look like a wall of text for struggling readers. But they are affordable, well-written, and don’t look babyish for older students.

Step 7: Review, Review, Review

Besides spelling, this is the step I see most parents and teachers struggle with when helping a child with reading difficulties. You need to put a plan in place to review phonics topics with your child.

Struggling readers tend to need 40-140 repetitions to learn a new skill to mastery. Once your child learns a new phonics skill most of the time, you can move on to a new skill.

While learning new skills, you should review old skills. As mentioned above, you can do this with a DIY spiral notebook. But that gets a little boring after a while.

My favorite ways to do the Phonics Read and Spell Games. It has over 80 phonics skills and they build on each other.

With this game, you simply have a binder for the full-page printable gameboards. and then you a plastic bin and paper clips for the flashcards.

Step 8: Listen to audiobooks

When most parents say their child struggles to read, they mean that the sounding out words part is hard. This is called decoding.

The first 7 steps address the decoding part of reading. This is the ability to read the words on the page.

But the phonics part of reading is just half the reading equation. Your child needs to understand the words they read on the page.

This part is called Language Comprehension. Some key pieces of language comprehension are vocabulary and general knowledge.

This makes sense because your child might be able to sound out the word “yam,” but it’s not something you normally eat your child won’t know the meaning.

Thus, while you are building up phonics or the decoding part of reading, make sure your child is still learning a ton of new words and new information.

Audiobooks are a great way to do this. Your child can listen to books well above their independent reading level.

This also helps with another part of language comprehension – sentence structure. Written English does have a different structure than spoken English. Listening to audiobooks struggling readers become more familiar with this.

You can access audiobooks for children for free with the Libby app through your local public library. You can also get a free trial of Audible for children’s books.

Please note that listening to audiobooks should not take the place of teaching a child to sound out words. Many school districts attempt to use this as an accommodation instead of teaching the child systematic phonics.

How can I help my child with a reading disability?

Whether your child has difficulty reading or has a diagnosed reading disability, these 8 steps are central to getting a child to read:

• Step 1: Improve your understanding of English
• Step 2: Start with phonemic awareness skills
• Step 3: Assess your child
• Step 4: Teach phonics step-by-step
• Step 5: Connect reading and spelling
• Step 6: Read decodable text
• Step 7: Review, review, review
• Step 8: Listen to audiobooks