Older elementary children and teens who are reading below grade level have developed coping strategies to try to be successful and meet grade level expectations.
Often these children and teens experience:
- Low Comprehension:Older elementary children and teens who are reading below grade level have developed coping strategies to be successful and meet grade level expectations. Comprehension is often identified as the issue. Typically these children and teens have memorized many words. They struggle to easily and quickly decode unfamiliar words so they overly use context clues to guess the words being read. Preoccupation with reading the words correctly means they often cannot remember details from the text.
- Poor Spelling: They have memorized a certain number of words but often have patterns of misspellings that get repeated or they may spell the same word three different ways on the same page.
- Simplistic Writing When asked to write a paragraph, they choose simple sentence structures and words with which they are very familiar to avoid spelling errors.
- Poor phonemic awareness and segmentation: They often do not automatically recall which sounds go with what letters. They also don’t recognize syllable patterns. They can’t divide words into syllables nor can they break syllables apart into individual sounds. This is why reading nonsense words can be so difficult for this group of children and teens. People may not know what nonsense words are or what that has to do with it. This is why reading higher level text can be so difficult for this group of children and teens.
