by Lorinda K. F. Newton

While scrolling through a few Facebook homeschool groups I belong to, I spotted several requests for reading help. Because the ability to read well is essential for a good education, I understand the concern, or even panic, that these moms may be experiencing. I wanted my children to read well, too.

My husband and I decided to homeschool before we had kids. When our first child was in preschool, I researched several language arts programs and decided on Spell to Write and Read because of its spelling emphasis.

As a child, I read early and at a higher level than most of my peers. Yet, I couldn’t spell. Because Spell to Write and Read has shown me that spelling well is a key to reading well, I often post a link to my review when I see requests for reading curriculum recommendations on these feeds.

This time, I thought to look more closely at these pleads for aid. Realistically, struggling children need someone to assess their difficulties to discover what each needs to succeed in reading. The Facebook posts only offer a snapshot of their issues. Here are a few:

• My 5yo daughter is having trouble recognizing the letters. She does good writing and knows colors and numbers. Any advice on how I can teach her in a way that works? At this age, my oldest knew all the letters.
• My 9yo is struggling to read larger words without sounding them out. I’m trying to find books she may enjoy reading but are easy so she will be excited about reading.
• I have a 6-year-old boy struggling with remembering a few letter sounds and learning to read. We have tried The Good and the Beautiful, and it didn’t seem to be a good fit, so I bought Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. But I also have heard All About Reading is a good one. I’m looking for recommendations from those who have tried these with a little one who struggles in this area.

Disclaimer. I have a BA in English, not in education or any field of therapy. I’m a mom who has a now-adult son who has some learning disabilities, including a writing disability and who needed speech therapy, and a daughter who didn’t speak English until she joined our family at age six. I’m not an expert in reading. What follows is drawn from research and some of my own experiences.

Some children struggle with reading because they may not be ready, others because they haven’t been given a strong foundation in phonics, and still others have a disability that prevents them from learning. So, as a parent, how do you know if you need to wait, switch curriculum, or seek a specialist?

When to Start Reading

The time to introduce reading remains a disputed topic.

Historically at Age Six

In the early 2000s, I attended a reading workshop at my first homeschool conference. The workshop speaker stated that children were not taught to read until they reached age six until recently. She explained that developmental changes needed to occur first. When preschoolers look at words, they see shapes, not individual letters. Then around age six, the brain develops the ability to understand that the words are made up of separate symbols, letters, that represent individual sounds.

A light bulb went off in my head. What the speaker said partially explained my spelling difficulties. I had taught myself to read before kindergarten, but I, too, remember viewing individual words like shapes. I knew words by their ascenders and descenders more than I did by the letters. For instance, the word dog was a tall letter, a medium letter, and a hanging letter. Often, I didn’t know what the vowels were!

Children who learn to read words by sight instead of phonetically often struggle to sound out unfamiliar and longer words as they get older. So, some recommend that children not be taught to read until they are six years old.

Age Span for Beginner Readers

The education community in the United States believes that when teaching reading, earlier is better. Many government schools expect children to know their letters before they enter kindergarten.

Other nations hold different views. In Finland, kindergarten teachers are not permitted to teach reading. A New Zealand researcher studied students who started reading at age five, six, or seven. To his surprise, he found that students gained no advantage to starting at age five instead of age seven. Most of the children read at the same level by age eleven.

So, this demonstrates that a time window exists for children to start reading. This fact might help the Facebook mom with the five-year-old.

My own son struggled to read at the primer level at the end of first grade. Then one night at age eight, he picked up a chapter book and completed it in one sitting. At the end of second grade, he was reading at the fifth-grade level. My daughter, on the other hand, took years to confidently read books on her own.

Homeschoolers have more freedom in their learning timetable than school children. So, perhaps reading at a later age isn’t as much as a big deal for homeschoolers than for classroom children. For instance, a Psychology Today blog post by Peter Gray, Ph.D., lists a series of learning-to-read stories from a group of unschoolers. Most of the children learned to read on their own when they were ready to and were not pushed by their parents to read at a certain age.

Children who aren’t reading yet can be read to, listen to audio books, and watch videos for their school subjects and literary exposure. Both my children enjoyed playing games that required reading when they couldn’t read yet. I just did the reading for them.

In Part 2, I will share some studies that disagree with the developmental approach to reading, the importance of phonic skills, and identifying a learning disability.

Lorinda K. F. Newton began homeschooling her children in 2004, and her family joined Academy Northwest in 2014. Her family lives on beautiful Whidbey Island north of Seattle, Washington. She writes about faith, culture, and governing from a biblical worldview at Lorinda’s Ponderings. ©2021 by Lorinda K. F. Newton.