10-Year-Old Can’t Read?
Mom, it’s gut-wrenching when your 10-year-old child in 4th grade can’t read. She is supposed to be well-on her way to becoming an independent learner, yet, there’s just ONE problem. And it doesn’t feel small. It feels BIG. She struggles to independently read and comprehend fictional stories and nonfiction texts in science class.
As a mom, you know what’s at stake when your 10-year-old can’t read well. Her confidence. Her ability to independently read, and therefore solve, basic math word problems. Her desire to independently explore topics in which she is interested, because although the initial exploration might be fun, summarizing a simple, even kid-friendly magazine article, perhaps about bracelet-making, without copying word for word, is going to be a challenge.
Dear mom, I want you to know, that you are not alone in having a child for whom reading is a challenge, and that your amazing, brilliant, sweet, loving daughter (or thoughtful, hard-working play-outside all day son) is also not the only 10-year child or 4th grader, for whom reading has not come easily.
When your 10-year-old can’t read at grade level, start with a baseline phonics assessment. This is a simple checklist completed with an experienced phonics teacher, coach or K-3 reading tutor, who knows the progressive order of phonics skills, simple to more complex.
Can your child look at ‘ng’ and say the sound /ng/. Can your child look at the digraph ‘ch’ and immediately say /ch/? Can your child look at the consonant blend ‘st’ and say both sounds quickly together in the consonant blend ‘st’? Can your child look at the r-controlled vowel ‘ar’ and quickly recall the phoneme or sound /ar/.
Can your child look at the vowel team ‘oe’ and know that spells long /o/, like in the word ‘toe’? Can your child look at ‘au’ and know that it says, /o/? This is where I would checklist for alternate spellings to represent sounds, because o spells /o/, but so does ‘au’ in the word ‘sauce’, ‘augh’ in the caught, ‘ough’ in the word bought, and so on. If your child knows how to read and spell basic vowel and consonant sounds that make up words, then I would move to the next step. Does your child know how to read a word when the y at the end acts like a vowel? Example – fly (one-syllable), grouchy (2-syllable)
Assess using checklist for your child’s knowledge of word chunks (phonics teachers call these morpheme). So, can your child look at the ‘tion’ and say that spells ‘tion’. Can your child look at ‘ture’ and say ‘the final stable syllable, like we talked about ‘le’ being a final stable syllable last episode, so look at the final stable syllable ‘ture’ and say /ture/. If he doesn’t yet know these basic word chunks, then when he sees the word ‘puncture’, he’s going to have difficulty decoding, which is the process a child’s brain goes through to read.
Does your child have enough practice reading and spelling words with prefixes, which are also word chunks, such as un (unwell), re (redone), uni (unicycle). Does your child have practice reading and spelling words with suffixes, ‘ment’ (basement), ‘able’, ‘ible’ (digestible, recognizable, unquestionable), etc.
Strengthening fluency – the speed at which your child reads. Why? Because strengthening reading fluency, the speed at which your child reads supports reading comprehension. When your child reads with flow, the text makes more sense, so they feel more purpose in reading. HOW? Repeated reading. Fluency grids when practicing reading and writing whole words using more advanced phonics concepts.
Stretch texts – there must be some challenge, or your child will be bored. Invest in some high-interest, low-level texts. So, decodable texts where the illustrations in graphic-novels (comic style) look ‘big-kid’ as opposed to using books with younger looking pictures because your older child still struggles with the text.
Intentionally teach and practice reading vocabulary words. Often, new vocabulary words, especially in science, are bigger words. So, your child will have appropriate challenge, there is purpose because the vocabulary words are related to the topic. Your child is going to feel like he’s winning when he can read those topic-specific vocabulary words out loud.
Finally, if your 10-year-old can’t read at grade level, it may be time to find an experienced phonics and reading tutor. As a former full-time K-3 phonics and core literacy elementary teacher, K-3 phonics and reading tutoring is what I do! I’d love to help your child get results in moving the needle forward as a reader and in doing so, increase his confidence.
