About 42 percent of fourth-graders have below basic reading skills, according to LD Online, and once children fall behind in reading in the early grades, they may struggle to catch up to their peers. Teaching older kids to read presents significant challenges to parents and educators, and strategies to help older children improve their reading skills often differ from those used to encourage reading in younger children.
Step 1
Get professional help. A reading specialist on staff at your child's school or school district can offer individualized instruction and support for older children struggling to read. He or she may work with your child's classroom teacher, recommend evaluations for learning disabilities and make suggestions to improve reading abilities at home. The specialist may also recommend comprehensive reading interventions available through your local school district.
Step 2
Work on the basics. According to LD Online, teaching older children to read relies on developing several fundamental skills: awareness of phonemes, the smaller sounds that make up a larger word; vocabulary, or word meaning; fluency, the ability to read smoothly and accurately; and comprehension, understanding and interpreting the text's meaning. To develop these skills in older students, teachers may use games or phonemic drills such as reverse-a-word. In this game, students say a word such as "teach," then repeat it by placing the last sound first and the first sound last.
Step 3
Try a comprehensive reading intervention program. Readers who've struggled to learn how to read at home and in mainstream school classrooms may benefit from comprehensive remedial reading programs, such as Read 180 or Language! In Read 180, a teacher shows kids how to read fluently. It also involves small group participation, computer instruction to build vocabulary and reading comprehension, and silent reading with the help of audio books. Language! allows kids to progress at their own pace, but emphasizes reading instruction, particularly phonics and word recognition, along with spelling and writing. According to AdLit.org, preliminary research indicates students in both Read 180 and Language! programs raised their reading scores on standardized tests.
Step 4
Encourage kids to teach themselves. AdLit.org notes that reciprocal teaching effectively improves students' reading comprehension. In reciprocal teaching, teachers ask students to predict, clarify and summarize a piece of text. As students discuss the passage and demonstrate increased comprehension, they take on the role of teaching the text to teachers. In one study of 53 ninth-graders who attended remedial reading classes, adolescent readers who performed reciprocal teaching experienced significant changes in reading comprehension skills, when compared to 22 students who did not use this method.
