Robbed of Reading: How Our Kids Have Been Left Behind
Was your child in pre-K through 3rd grade when the pandemic began in 2020? If so, they are likely one of the millions of elementary students who now need intensive reading help.
Research shows ⅓ of ALL elementary age kids in the US now need some sort of remedial reading intervention. An entire generation of children was robbed of its formative and emerging reading years by school closures, virtual learning, masks, lowered standards, overwhelmed teachers, and stressed-out parents.
So what’s next for these kids? Will we just continue a cycle of tutoring, extra help, and frustration, or will we give them the tools they need to be confident readers?
Should You Just Give It Another Year?
If your student struggles with reading, don’t put off getting them the help they need. It’s critical to discover why they’re struggling, what their unique cognitive skill set is, and where they need support in order to give them the push they need to succeed.
Research shows that the longer you wait to address reading issues the larger the gap becomes. Don’t just wait for it to click. Don’t just entrust the task of catching up to your child’s teacher. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to catch up, so act now to give your child the best chance at reading success moving forward.
What’s the Best Way to Learn Reading?
Reading is a complex task that encompasses:
- Identifying and blending sounds
- Fluently decoding words
- Accurately spelling sounds that they hear
- Confidently comprehending what they’re reading
There has been a push in American schools to focus on sight words, guessing strategies, and picture cues. Proponents have thought that as long as kids are spending time with books, they’ll learn to read. But now research is showing otherwise. Even the creators of some of these curriculum types are back-tracking and saying that yes, actually, phonics mastery is critical to become a successful reader.
Research shows that a solid, logical progression of learning phonics is the most important factor when it comes to becoming a strong reader. This should be supplemented with reading out loud and other tasks that improve vocabulary and depth, but the basics of sounds and manipulating them needs to be the foundation.
It’s important for your child to have a solid foundation of phonemic awareness and auditory processing in order to master the basics of reading before it gets too far away from them. We are seeing kids in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades who just don’t have this foundation because those academic years were so disrupted and rushed due to global events. These kids are feeling more frustrated, stressed, and resistant to school because of their lack of confidence.
How Does LearningRx Train Reading Skills?
Reading is not a natural skill like talking. It’s a trained, learned phenomenon that requires a variety of cognitive skills. Your child needs to be able to focus, recognize letter codes, understand the sound they make, and manipulate the words on the page to derive meaning.
If there are hangups in any of these areas, your child will continue to struggle despite any other forms of intervention you may try.
LearningRx has a unique approach to reading help that gets down to the basics of sounds and codes. Every ReadRx student goes back to learning one sound at a time and builds from there so we can make sure they have the solid foundation they need. Our reading help program builds in complexity and encompasses phonics, blending, segmenting, spelling, comprehension, and more critical skills.
Summer is the perfect time to help your child catch up in reading by several years (yes, really.) Our results show that clients improve in reading and other cognitive skills by an average of 3.6 years just within 6 months of their ReadRx training program!
This could be the summer that your child goes from reading below grade level to excelling. You don’t have to just keep struggling through! Give us a call today to learn more about how our reading skills training can make a difference in your child’s life.
