“Specific warning signs – varying by age and grade – can help teachers flag a student’s learning disabilities early,” says Richard Selznick, PhD, a psychologist, nationally certified school psychologist, and the director of the Cooper Learning Center, a child-learning program affiliated with the Children’s Regional Hospital at Cooper University Health Care. ” A majority of students will take to early reading activities – recognizing letters, learning the letters’ sounds – very easily. They learn quickly from parent interaction, classroom activities, and even watching educational programs like Sesame Street. But many children struggle, and it’s important to identify learning disabilities early so students get the support they need.”
Dr. Selznick’s red flags for early learning disabilities include the following, listed by grade range:
Preschool-Kindergarten
Difficulty with Letter Recognition:
Most children start to learn their letters between the ages of 4 and 5. Letter awareness and letter recognition at this age is a good predictor that the child will have early reading success. In contrast, a 3- or 4-year old child struggling to learn the names of upper and lowercase letters is a predictor that the child might struggle with developing early reading skills.
Difficulty connecting letters with their sounds; difficulty rhyming, and/or playing with sounds and words:
A majority of preschoolers can do rhyming and engage in phonemic awareness types of activities, but some children seem to lack an intuitive awareness about how sounds can be manipulated. For example, ask a 5-year-old child to say the word “cat” out loud, and then ask the child to say the word without the “c” sound (sound the “c” sound out for the child). The child’s ability to perform that task and correctly say “at” is a good predictor of early reading success, as it shows facility with phonemic awareness. You need to closely watch those children who can’t do those kinds of tasks.
Reading resistance:
Sometimes a child will do everything he or she can to avoid reading or reading-related activities. The child intuitively understands “this isn’t coming easily to me,” and becomes more avoidant as a result.
Parent predisposition:
Another predictor for early reading difficulties is whether either of a student’s parents (or both) also struggled with reading when they were young. These predictors start to add up like they are weights on a scale. So if you have a parent’s history of reading struggles, and a child who is not able to rhyme and not able to pick up on the letter’s names or sounds early on, you have a good indication that the child is going to face difficulties with reading development in first grade- when formal reading activities are introduced.
First Grade
When reading or listening to early reading books like The Cat in the Hat, most first grade students begin to internalize the sound and letter system, which leads to the decoding of words. They start to put it all together, and reading becomes a relatively smooth process. But for many students learning to read is not a smooth process and, in first grade, they face even higher learning hurdles.
Too much guessing:
Guessing using context – in the text, in picture books photos – is an encouraged reading strategy that is based on the reader’s sense of meaning, sense of syntax, and the ability to verify guessing by decoding the letters of a word. But some children guess more than they read. When children face unfamiliar words but they do not have an internalized sense of phonics (decoding), they will often guess at the word and substitute anything, even if it’s nonsensical or disrupts the meaning. For example, a child reads the text, “ I remember the house by the lake,” as “ I remember the horse by the lake.” This guessing becomes particularly pronounced in second and third grades, when there are many more unfamiliar, multi-syllabic words.
An inability to break down words (in isolation) into component parts and sounds; difficulty reading nonsense words:
A very strong predictor that is part of the reading assessment battery is giving a child a series of nonsense words to read. For example, if a child has trouble sounding out non-sense words like “gat” or “fep,” this is a strong predictor that the child might experience early reading struggles.
Late First Grade – Early Second Grade
At this stage, for the struggling reader, reading becomes really laborious very quickly. Words start to come fast and furious. Low frequency words- like porcupine, or other two- or three-syllable words- enter into second grade reading. By now, the student faces a combined reading-spelling-writing problem. Red flags to note:
Writing development problems:
Look to the writing. A child’s response to open-ended writing assignments – journal writing or a prompt like “write about Thanksgiving” can be a good indicator. How is the child writing? Is it a laborious process? What is spelling like? How are the sentences formed?
Significant spelling problems:
Watch for a student who frequently guesses at their spelling, leaving out lots of word sounds and parts.
Weakness and/or inefficiency in following direction:
Ask a student to copy a short passage of text from the board. If he or she takes much longer to perform the task than the average student, the need for extra time may indicate that the student has problems processing language.
Laborious reading aloud:
At the beginning of a school year, teachers’ portfolio assessments using simple tools – graded word lists or story passages – can provide important information on each student. Have each student read out loud and listen to them. Is it being done smoothly? Is it labored? Is there a lot of hesitancy? Does the student make a lot of substitution errors?
Inattention or other behavioral problems:
A lot of children labeled ADHD have cognitive variability that could be identified, once evaluated, as active working memory problems, processing speed deficits, tracking problems, or perceptual problems. A lot of those children get off-task easily when asked to perform activities they can’t do very smoothly, so they’re labeled as inattentive.
I advocate investing extra time to build a struggling reader’s foundational skills. Keep this focus on fundamentals even if a struggling reader is in second grade, where learning objectives begin to target higher-order thinking skills and reading comprehension.
I am unabashedly “bottom up” with children who are struggling to read. If the child can’t do reading, spelling, and writing activities, we need to teach him or her at the level where he or she is- staying very skill based and worrying about comprehension down the road. Everything else bottlenecks if the struggling learner can’t get over that decoding hurdle.
Dr. Richard Selznick is a psychologist, nationally-certified school psychologist, graduate school professor, and university professor of pediatrics. He is also the director of the Cooper Learning Center, a child-learning program affiliated with the Children’s Regional Hospital at Cooper University Healthcare in southern New Jersey. He is the author of three books, “The Shut Down Learner,” “School Struggles,” and “Dyslexia Screening: Essential Concepts.” Dr. Selznick blogs about school struggling, dyslexia, and learning disabilities at www.shutdownlearner.com.