“Is It Too Late for My Child to Catch Up?” How to Help Kids who are Below Grade Level

This is a question we hear often, especially after the disruption the last 2+ years have caused for kids in school. Many kids are registering as being “below grade level” in subjects like math and reading, and the stress of trying to keep up has taken its toll on kids and parents alike. 

It’s easy to wonder if this is just what school is going to be like from here on out… the constant cycle of tutoring, remedial classes, and extra interventions. The tear-filled homework nights. The teacher emails and phone calls. Is it just too late?

While every situation is different, there is hope. By approaching your child’s learning skills in the right way, you can help them catch up and even excel in the classroom.

Is a Tutor the Right Choice for Your Family?

When your child is below grade level, the natural first assumption is that you need a tutor. Tutors are great for reinforcing content, but the reality is that they don’t address the root cause of learning struggles. Getting down to what’s making it so hard for your child to keep up is critical to helping them gain ground.

A tutor is helpful in certain situations, such as:

• If your child missed lots of instruction time due to illnesses or absences
• When a teacher is inexperienced or unclear in their instruction methods
• If there was a lot of substitute instruction
• Or if there were any other tangible in-class disruptions that kept your child from really getting the instruction in the first place.

Hiring a tutor makes sense if there is only struggle in one particular subject. But if your child deals with reading struggles, trouble focusing, poor recall, or other more deep-seeded learning challenges, tutoring may not be the right choice to help them catch up.

How Brain Training is a Different Approach for Below-Grade-Level Kids

While tutors focus on content instruction, brain training looks at your child and how they learn. We like to say that there are 2 parts to smart: how you learn AND what you learn. High quality instruction is critical, but so is having a brain that is able to process new information and store it efficiently.

Brain training tackles this other part of “smart” in a way that is unique. Instead of reteaching the same concepts over and over again, we look at your child and determine where their barriers are to learning something the first time.

In other words: why is learning hard for this person as an individual? What is “blocking” learning from happening efficiently in their brain?

And for all of our clients, it comes down to cognitive skills.

Cognitive skills are what your brain uses to take in the world around you and make sense of it. These are things like attention, memory, processing speed, logic & reasoning, auditory processing, and visual processing which determine how your brain handles sensory input and what it does with this new information. 

For kids with cognitive skill weaknesses, this can mean:

• They have trouble processing instruction auditorily or visually, so the information really doesn’t even make it to the “storage” phase
• They have trouble focusing so their attention wanders and they tune out quickly
• Their memory can’t hold onto new information long enough to use it or save it for later
• They have trouble thinking outside the box or solving problems

These are things that impact learning in all environments and all subjects! When your child has one or more weak cognitive skills, learning is going to continue to be a struggle until those skills are strengthened.

Don’t Wait to Help Your Child Catch Up!

We have had amazing experiences helping struggling learners catch up to their grade levels—and even surpass them. On average, our clients gain at least 3 years in cognitive skill growth over the course of a program (and that includes reading!)

So if your child is stressed out about school, always feels behind, or is below grade level in one or more subjects, it’s time to get to the root cause.

We know the last couple of years have been hard on kids. But waiting it out is not going to help them—in fact, research has found that the longer you wait to address things like reading struggles, the bigger the gap becomes.

Rather than just giving it one more year (that will likely still be filled with stress and struggle), you can take the first step today towards helping your child regain some ground in their learning. 

The first thing you need to do is discover which “roadblocks” are keeping them from learning effectively. 

You can do this with our free brain quiz (here), but if you want a more in-depth picture into what’s happening in your child’s brain, give us a call and schedule your cognitive skills assessment now!

After you know where your child stands cognitively, we can work with you to create a plan that will target their weak skills and strengthen them so their brain will be primed and ready for learning in the school year ahead!

While all client results vary, we firmly believe (and our research and past client outcomes show) that a foundation of strong cognitive skills makes learning easier and leads to greater success in the classroom and beyond.

Give us a call today to learn more!