How to Help a Child with Reading Difficulties

Amanda Unrau
M.A. CCC-SLP
04/07/26 | Last modified: 04/07/26

Can you imagine how frustrating it must be for a child when they struggle to read? A child with reading difficulties misses out on so much of the information that is taught and learned in school every day. Maybe you’ve seen a child who can barely read a few words. Even watching a child like this try to read can feel discouraging. 

Many children face this challenge. In fact, one estimate is that 10 million children have difficulties learning to read. The good news is that there are practical and proven strategies that can change this. Most children who receive reading support while they are young can overcome their reading difficulties. This is why early support is key.

What Are Reading Difficulties?

Reading difficulties can present themselves in the two main components of reading: reading fluency and reading comprehension. Children with reading difficulties often have poor word recognition, weak reading comprehension, or both.

Signs Your Child May Be Struggling with Reading

As parents and teachers, it is important to monitor and be aware of how your child or student is doing. The sooner you identify a child struggling with reading, the sooner they can receive reading support. Below are some signs that a child may have reading difficulties.

Difficulties during reading:

• Poor word recognition

• Weak reading fluency 

• Poor decoding

• Slow and halted reading

• Poor comprehension

Academic struggles:

• Poor spelling

• Weak vocabulary

• Difficulty making inferences and using prior knowledge to make connections

• Avoid reading and participating in class

Emotional/Behavioral signs:

• Lack of confidence

• Poor self-esteem

• Anxiety, frustration, shame

• Feel behind or babyish when given simpler texts to read 

• Deflect attention by acting out or being a class clown

What Causes Reading Difficulties in Children?

Reading difficulties can be caused by several underlying factors. Multiple factors are often involved. Below are the main causes of reading difficulties in children.

Language Deficits:

• Poor phonological processing (using sounds to process spoken and written language)

• Weak vocabulary

• Poor morphology (word structure) and syntax (word order in sentences)

• Limited early literacy exposure

Other factors:

• Auditory processing deficits

• Attention and memory deficits

• Neurological factors

• Learning differences (e.g., dyslexia)

How to Help a Child with Reading Difficulties (Step-by-Step)

Reading intervention for children struggling with reading should include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to help a child with reading difficulties.

1. Start with Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) within spoken words. 

Why does phonemic awareness matter? Children need to be able to blend sounds in order to form words while reading.

Phonemic awareness activities include blending sounds into words, segmenting words into sounds, deleting sounds, adding sounds, and switching out sounds in words.

2. Multisensory Phonics and Decoding Practice

Phonics instruction teaches children the relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.

Decoding, or sounding out words, is the process of using this letter-sound relationship to translate printed words into spoken words.

Phonics activities include word-building tasks, such as:

• Playing with magnetic letters and putting them in alphabetical order

• Identifying familiar words and letter patterns in road signs and posters

• Writing notes and emails to friends and family members

• Looking at all the letters in a word when sounding it out

A multisensory approach to phonics includes:

• Listening

• Speaking

• Reading

• Tactile/kinesthetic components

Multisensory techniques aid in learning and memory and provide support for struggling readers.

As children build on their reading skills, these additional supports can be slowly scaled back and eventually removed. This method is also more engaging and motivating for many students, which helps them to focus on the sequence of letters in written words.

Examples of multisensory phonics activities include: using gestures to represent each sound, using manipulatives to represent sounds, and sand writing, tracing, and acting.

3. Oral Reading for Fluency

Fluency is a student’s ability to read a text accurately at a good pace with appropriate expression, including pauses, emphasis, and tone. It is developed over time through practice.

Repeated and Oral Reading: This involves students reading passages out loud as they receive guidance and feedback. Students are encouraged to reread texts until they achieve a certain level of fluency.

4. Focus on Comprehension Skills

Reading comprehension is essential for learning in all subjects. Good readers are able to:

• Draw on prior knowledge and draw inferences 

• Pay attention to text cohesion

• Self-monitor, form mental images

• Summarize and retell

• Think about text structure

Strategies for improving comprehension skills include

• Taking notes while reading

• Using graphic organizers to outline a text

• Making flashcards of key terms

• Forming mental images while reading

• Pairing up with a peer to take turns summarizing a text

• Answering questions about a story while reading

5. Create a Consistent Reading Routine

When we want to master a skill, consistency and repetition are key. The same is true for improving reading skills. This is why it is important to create a consistent reading routine.

Encourage daily reading. The more often students practice, the sooner they will learn new skills and continue to develop and build on them day after day. Students will also get into a good habit and know that reading is just part of their daily routine. 

One way to ensure that students will keep practicing reading is to stick with shorter. consistent sessions instead of long, irregular ones. If reading practice is too long, students will dread it. When a task is challenging, it can be beneficial to stop before a child gets frustrated and wants to give up. In addition, if sessions are inconsistent, students get out of the habit and have a harder time building on their new skills.

6. Build Confidence and Motivation

Struggling readers often feel frustrated or embarrassed, so we want to encourage them and help build their confidence that they can be successful readers. 

Celebrate small wins. When a child sounds out a challenging word or recognizes a new letter pattern, acknowledge it! Be specific and tell them what they did. “Hey, look at that! You knew all the sounds in that word and put them together to sound it out!”

Avoid pressure. A child who has reading difficulties already knows that they struggle to read. Keep instruction and practice light and build on what they can do instead of only focusing on what they can’t do. While it is important to practice reading aloud, they may dread doing so in front of the whole class. When they do this, give them a short section to read, or have them read aloud with a parent, teacher, or one or two other peers.

7. Personalize Learning to Your Child

While these steps provide a general framework, reading instruction should be personalized to each child. Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach in order to meet the needs of all children.

Take into account each child’s interests, level, and pace. Identify their baseline skills to determine a good starting point, and be sure to continuously monitor their progress in order to make adjustments. 

Activities to Improve Kids’ Reading Skills at Home

As parents, there are many things you can do at home to help support and build your child’s reading skills. Here are some examples:

• Read with your child. Of course, this is the most important part of boosting your child’s literacy skills. Read aloud to your child, have them read to you, or take turns reading a book together. As you read, ask your child questions about the story to boost comprehension. Have your child retell the story at the end.

• Play phonics games. Play I Spy by saying “I spy with my little eye something that starts with mmm” and see if they can find something in the room that starts with that sound. Another idea is to have a sheet of paper with 3 boxes on it. Give your child 3 magnetic letters and have them unscramble them on the paper to form a word.

• Practice story sequencing. Have your child draw pictures of the main steps in a story and write or tell you what happened. You can also print off pictures of a story and have your child put them in order.

• Word walls are a great way to build a robust vocabulary. Each time your child comes across a word they don’t know, have them write it down and work with them to find out the meaning. Eventually,  they will have a large list of words they know! Another way to do a word wall is to write down each word they learn to read. Either way, this is an encouraging visual representation of their progress for your child. 

• Create reading journals together. Your child can use a reading journal to keep track of books or stories they have read, summarize texts, or record favorite quotes.

When Should You Seek Professional Help?

Sometimes, home reading practice isn’t enough, and children need professional help. Keep these things in mind when making that determination.

• If you notice persistent struggles that continue month after month with little improvement, it may be time to look into other options. 

• Watch for signsof dyslexia. These include: slow reading with frequent errors, difficulty sounding out words, poor spelling, difficulty writing, limited vocabulary, and difficulty sequencing and recalling information they’ve read.

• Most schools have reading specialists who offer assessment and reading instruction. They can identify students who have reading difficulties and provide explicit instruction.

The Benefits of Using Forbrain to Help a Child with Reading Difficulties

Forbrain is a tool that can be added to reading instruction for a child with reading difficulties. 

It is an auditory stimulation headset that provides auditory feedback to the wearer. 

This allows a child using Forbrain to hear their speech louder and more clearly, which supports reading and phonics instruction when students read aloud. 

It also helps children focus and stay motivated during reading or phonemic awareness practice.

Bottom Line

A child who struggles to read doesn’t have to stay in that place of frustration and discouragement. They can become a successful and confident reader! When helping a child struggling with reading, be sure to include the key components of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. Use the steps above as a guide, but be sure to individualize it for your unique child. Encourage them to stick with it, and before you know it, they will be reading with increased fluency and comprehension, and even come to enjoy it.

References

ASHA. (Accessed 2026, March 28). Disorders of Reading and Writing. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/written-language-disorders/disorders-of-reading-and-writing/?srsltid=AfmBOoqeqsIDjSl9vH6i5petg7LhZAKz2JiibYiRet-3W3f3Cgcc1RCG

ASHA. (Accessed 2026, March 29). Signs and Symptoms of Written Language Disorders. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/written-language-disorders/signs-and-symptoms-of-written-language-disorders/

ASHA. (Accessed 2026, March 29). Written Language Disorders. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. https://www.asha.org/Practice-Portal/Clinical-Topics/Written-Language-Disorders

Drummon, Kathryn. (Accessed 2026, March 27). About Reading Disabilities, Learning Disabilities, and Reading Difficulties. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/struggling-readers/articles/about-reading-disabilities-learning-disabilities-and-reading

Reading Rockets. (Accessed 2026, March 30). Basics: Phonics and Decoding. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/reading-101/reading-and-writing-basics/phonics-and-decoding

Reading Rockets. (Accessed 2026, March 30). Fluency: An Introduction. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/fluency/articles/fluency-introduction

Reading Rockets. (Accessed 2026, March 30). Phonics Instruction: The Value of a Multi-Sensory Approach. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/curriculum-and-instruction/articles/phonics-instruction-value-multi-sensory-approach

Reading Rockets. (Accessed 2026, March 30). Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: Introduction. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/reading-101/reading-101-learning-modules/course-modules/phonological-and-phonemic-awareness

Reading Rockets. (Accessed 2026, March 30). Target the Problem: Comprehension. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/helping-all-readers/why-some-kids-struggle/target-problem/comprehension

Reading Rockets. (Accessed 2026, March 30). Target the Problem: Word Decoding and Phonics. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/helping-all-readers/why-some-kids-struggle/target-problem/word-decoding-and-phonics

Will, Madeline. (2022, January 4). What Teachers Can Do To Help Struggling Readers Who Feel Ashamed. EdWeek. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/what-teachers-can-do-to-help-struggling-readers-who-feel-ashamed/2022/01