Obstacles To Reading

Written by Maren Schmidt on November 7th, 2014

The important thing is to be sure your child is in a language-enriched environment, learning the sounds of
the letters and learning to hear the sounds in the words.
My experience is that children with minds that are more oriented to mathematical and spatial skills, tend to
begin reading later.
If the child has been in an encouraging environment, by the time they are twelve, there is usually not a
reading skill difference between the early and late reader.
If your child is not a fluent reader by age seven, he or she may be encountering some obstacles that need
adult assistance.
Another obstacle your child might encounter is not being able to read left to right.
Some children will start decoding a word from the right or in the middle. Their eye muscles may be weak and
need practice in moving left to right. To help your child overcome this obstacle, use one-word vocabulary
cards and place a sticker on his left hand to help him to remember to start on the left. Remind him that words
make sense, and that each word he tries to read will be a word that is in his spoken vocabulary.
The next obstacle is not having the ability to see the spaces between the words.
To someone who is having this difficulty, a sentence looks like one huge, horrible word. Making booklets of
three word phrases with a picture clue will help your child begin to see the spaces between the words. (See
last week’s article, Steps to Reading.) Encourage your child to place a finger at the end of a word before
starting to write the next word, so the spaces become more evident.
Reading from the top of the page, line by line, to the bottom, is another difficulty for the new reader.
Many times a young reader’s eye muscles are not developed enough to move left to right and back again to
pick up the next line. Making small booklets with two lines of writing per page will help your beginning reader
exercise her eyes and develop success with reading.
Difficulty picking out letter patterns is another obstacle.
Some young readers will have difficulty seeing phonograms, two or more letters that make a different sound,
such as “sh”, “th”, “ch”, “oi”, “oa”, “oo”, and the vowel-consonant-silent “e” combination as in bike. Making
lists of words with these letter combinations will help your reader develop a visual memory of these
combinations. Going through the newspaper and looking for certain phonograms is also a fun activity.
There can be many obstacles to reading development, usually due to trying to jump a step developmentally.
Every person’s brain develops at a different rate, but in observable developmental patterns. Reading success is
dependent on a foundation of phonemic awareness and letter/sound recognition.
Remember, to assure reading success, start at the beginning by introducing each letter and its unique
sound.
Be aware that your child might encounter developmental obstacles due to their unique brain development
and that these obstacles might take some time to overcome. Always encourage your child and keep your
home language enriched.