The Reason Bright Kids Often Struggle To Read and How To Help

It is unfortunate that some children develop serious reading problems quite unnecessarily. The cause can be the design of the early reading books that they use. As a parent or teacher, it is important to know the pattern of symptoms you will see when this is happening.

However, this problem has proved easy to fix.

The Pattern of Failure

Things often start out well. A child will learn most of the alphabet fine and then even a few words without seeming to have a problem.

But as the child starts to read books, you will see some guessing of words going on. And often the guess has no relation to the word on the page, but makes sense in the context.

The guessing and difficulty just seem to increase as the child moves up to more complicated books.

Eventually it all gets too much and the child's confidence collapses. By now it can be very difficult to progress in any direction because there will be heavy resistance to reading at all.

Without the right help, the child can get stuck in this state permanently, wrecking their entire education, even though we find it can usually be fixed in a matter of weeks.

The Underlying Issue

Reading is a complex task and it is natural for a child to use whatever approach seems easiest. If your child has a good visual memory, then remembering words by sight seems the best option.

Any child will almost certainly be being taught phonics in the classroom. But, in a whole class setting, it is easy to be quietly baffled, without the teacher really knowing or having the time to work through it one-on-one in any case.

Now the concept behind most early reading books actually encourages this memorisation approach. They use very few words which get repeated a lot.

But, unfortunately, the child's reading is not really progressing at all. And eventually you reach the end of the blind alley.

We need to gently lead them out of their dead end and down the right path.

The Simple Fix

The most important thing is to help the child get a handle on all the different phonemes being used in English. You need to give these abstract sounds dimensionality, so that they are easier to remember. For instance, in Easyread we use classic memory enhancement techniques and connect each sound to a bright, active and slightly surreal image. That makes them very easy for the child to use as a memory hook.

Next, you must find a way to draw the child away from the memorisation and guessing approach to reading. In Easyread we do this with games designed to do that.

And finally, you need to create a way for the child to read text, without getting stuck. Easyread does that by floating the image for each phoneme above the words in Easyread Text. That means the child can look for a clue whenever a word is unfamiliar.

Using these simple techniques you will see dramatic progress. Children who have become totally frustrated and depressed can learn to read in 2-6 months.

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