It’s August. The backpacks are out, the school supply lists are printed, and somewhere in your house there’s a summer reading log that’s… mostly filled in. 😉
This summer, if you listened to your child read aloud — at bedtime, in the car, over a cereal box — you got something valuable: a front-row seat to how their brain handles print.
Every child stumbles sometimes. That’s normal. But how a child stumbles matters, and research has identified some specific patterns worth listening for. Here are six:
1. Made-up words are the hardest words. Ask your child to read a silly word like “blorp” or “trisk.” Kids with reading differences often struggle to sound out words they’ve never seen before — because they can’t lean on memory, they have to use letter-sound rules alone. Researchers consider this one of the clearest signals of all (Rack, Snowling, & Olson, 1992; Herrmann et al., 2006).
2. The sounds and letters don’t match up. “Bat” becomes “bet.” “Ship” becomes “sip.” When letter-sound connections stay wobbly — especially vowels — long after classmates have locked them in, that’s worth noting (Vellutino et al., 2004).
3. They swap in a whole different word. “House” becomes “horse.” “Was” becomes “went.” This is the brain guessing from the context, or based on the shape of the word instead of actually decoding it — a clever workaround that eventually stops working as words get longer (Vellutino et al., 2004; De Rom & Van Reybroeck, 2024).
4. The little words disappear. “The,” “a,” “an,” “of” — gone. It seems backward, right? Your child can read dinosaur but skips the? Here’s what’s happening: when decoding isn’t automatic yet, it takes real mental effort — so the brain spends its energy on the big, meaning-carrying words and quietly skips the small connectors it decides it can live without (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; De Rom & Van Reybroeck, 2024). Your child usually doesn’t even notice they’ve done it.
5. Letters and syllables go missing. “Remember” becomes “remeber.” “Animal” becomes “aminal.” Sounds get dropped, added, or shuffled — especially in longer words.
6. Reading is slow and effortful. Maybe your child gets the words right but sounds like they’re lifting weights while doing it. Research shows that slow, labored reading is its own signal, separate from accuracy (Wolf & Bowers, 1999). If reading aloud leaves your child exhausted and frustrated, listen closely.
If you recognize your child in this list, here’s what we want you to know — you don’t have to wait and see. Reading struggles don’t resolve by pushing through more reading logs, but they do respond to the right instruction or intervention.
This is one of the most well-researched, most treatable learning differences there is, and a proper evaluation can tell you exactly what’s going on and what to do about it. Noticing one of these now and then doesn’t mean anything is wrong. But if several of them showed up all summer, consistently, it’s worth a conversation. Early answers open early doors. 💛
Take the first step now to start the school year off right.
References
