My child is not reading at an age-appropriate level. What should I do?

Question

Patricia Welty · Accepted Answer

If your child is experiencing difficulties with reading, early intervention is the key. Parents should seek support to bolster these skills as soon as possible. This will facilitate a child’s ability to fully participate and excel in academic settings by helping the child access written information and knowledge needed for success in a variety of settings. Delays in reading often have a compounding effect on learning and can impact a child’s development across many subjects. However, intervention has been proven to be effective and can help your child establish a love of stories.

Reading difficulties can arise due to several factors. Phonological awareness skills may be weak, which impacts a child’s ability to be able to discriminate, identify, and manipulate sounds in spoken words. A child may have difficulty identifying sounds in the beginning, middle, or end of words. They may also have trouble segmenting sentences into words, words into syllables, and syllables into sounds.

Delays in reading can also stem from challenges when trying to read words by sight or when attempting to determine what sounds letters make, and how the sounds change when they are paired or grouped with other sounds. All of these difficulties may affect a child’s ability to comprehend what they read. Reading comprehension also requires other skills, such as attending, remembering, and inferencing, and integrating these skills may be difficult for some children. As a result, meeting academic standards can become very challenging.

At Open Lines®, our expertly trained licensed SLPs will guide your child through a comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of their literacy and language skills to determine strengths and weaknesses as well as the underlying cause of reading challenges. An appropriate plan of care will then be established to help your child strengthen skills and establish a love for reading at home and school.

Our therapists are licensed by the New York State Education Department (NYSED) as Teacher of Students with Speech and Language Disabilities and registered with New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE). Additionally, many team members are specially certified and trained in several literacy-specific programs including the Orton-Gillingham literacy Approach and the Lindamood-Bell method. Whether your child is at the “learning to read” or “reading to learn” stage of academics, we are here to help your child become a successful, confident reader!

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