Why Your Kindergartener Still Can’t Read: 7 Red Flags Teachers Won’t Tell You
Most kindergarten reading problems start with warning signs teachers dismiss as developmental differences. Research shows 37% of fourth-graders read below basic proficiency, with struggles rooted in unaddressed kindergarten red flags like poor phonemic awareness...
Two and a half months ago, a mother from Portland sat down with her daughter’s kindergarten teacher. Her 5 year old daughter had just completed 4 months of formal schooling and was unable to recognize the letter “M” for shape or sound. The teacher smiled at her and said, “Oh, I am sure she will catch up to her peers. Every child develops at their own pace.” Well, 3 months have passed since that meeting and the daughter is further behind. This is a sad but typical case in the United States when children fail in reading in later grades. Most of the reading failure in US starts in kindergarten when obvious warning signs are dismissed as “every child develops at their own pace”.
This child’s reading deficiencies are largely exacerbated by huge increases in screen time amongst adults and, subsequently, kids. As adults spend 7 hours 4 mins of their time each day consuming digital media, it’s little wonder that their little ones follow in their footsteps and, by the time they are 5 or 5, have had ample opportunity to forgo developing phonological awareness through conversations with real, live people for watching screens. Screen time tends to be more passive than active and hence kids are unlikely to develop reading skills when YouTube clips and countless, various digital media are so easily pressed for instant consumption by kids, these days. True, every time.
Red Flag #1: Your Child Can’t Isolate Beginning Sounds
The letter “B” sound begins the word “ball”. By mid-kindergarten, your child should be able to tell you that the sound for the letter “T” is /t/. This skill, phonemic awareness, is more predictive of a child’s ability to read than their IQ. In her book, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print, Marilyn Jager Adams said that by the age of six, children can tell you that the sound for the letter “T” is /t/ or that the sound for the letter “K” is /k/ or that the sound for the letter “S” is /s/. Children who cannot tell you the individual sounds for letters by the age of six will have great difficulty with reading for years to come.
The specific test: say three words like “mat, sit, cat” and ask which ones rhyme. A kindergartener who can’t do this by January needs intervention immediately. Not next year. Not “let’s wait and see.” Teachers often hesitate to alarm parents, believing the child will spontaneously develop these skills. They won’t. Phonemic awareness requires explicit instruction for 20-30% of children, according to data from the National Reading Panel’s 2000 meta-analysis. That sticks.
The streaming generation faces particular challenges in this area as family’s have changed the way in which they subscribe to streaming services, such as Netflix Standard rising by 40% in value between 2022 and 2024, Disney+ rising by 38% in value during the same time frame with many opting for ad-supported packages in order to afford them to be played in the background as background entertainment. Thus, rather than hearing many adult conversations children of today are exposed to much more written / printed language in the form of scripted dialogue.
Red Flag 2: Your Child Does Not Recognize The Same Amount Of Letters As Her/his Peers
By December of kindergarten, most children can recognize 20-24 of the 26 uppercase letters. Children should be able to write these letters instantly. Take a stroll down to your child’s classroom and take a gander at the alphabet chart on the wall. If your child cannot recognize less than 15 of the letters by winter break, then your child is significantly behind in letter recognition. A child’s lack of recognition of letters in kindergarten is not a sign of your child’s lack of intelligence. Rather, it more likely is a sign that your child is not receiving sufficient quality of reading instruction or that the reading instruction that your child is receiving is not meeting your child’s needs.
The numbers for smart home devices are astounding. In 2023 there were 1.08 billion shipments of smart home devices globally, up 11% year over year. Clearly families are embracing smart home devices. And within that category, there are some products that are way more popular than others. Specifically, the Amazon Eero mesh systems and smart displays found in many family rooms are often left on 24/7 and used by kids and adults alike. The devices and apps that facilitate learning to read, on the other hand, are often used passively by kids and lack the repetition and structured practice that research shows is necessary to teach letter recognition. Why then do all the literacy guides for parents and educators instruct parents to use YouTube and apps to teach their kids to read? I asked a real reading instructor to outline the steps for teaching a child to recognize the letter T. She was happy to oblige and her steps were nothing like the YouTube or apps.
Red Flag 3: No Interest in Books or Print.
Is your child motivated to read print? Does your kindergarten child choose books to read during free time? Does your child pretend to read during make-believe and can retell a story that he or she heard? These are indicators of print motivation and are studied by reading researchers including Mark Sénéchal and Danielle LeFevre in their 2002 report in the Journal of Educational Psychology, “The effect of family literacy programs on letter knowledge in preschoolers.” Children who are not motivated to read print by age 6 have typically not had enough exposure to meaningful reading of books during read-alouds and discussion about books.
“Children who don’t see print as meaningful or interesting by age six have typically had insufficient exposure to engaging read-alouds and book discussions. The problem isn’t the child. It’s the literacy environment.” – Dr. Susan Neuman, University of Michigan
Red Flag 4: Difficulty with Letter-Sound Correspondence
Most importantly, your child should be able to write the letters for sounds by spring of kindergarten. The following examples show how a child should be able to write the sound for a letter. For example, for the letter “T” your child should be able to write “t” not “tuh”. For the letter “A” your child should be able to write “a” not “ay”. When electric cars first came out they only captured 4% of the sales of new cars on the market. However, as the technology has caught up to consumers’ needs, the number of cars sold on the market that are electric has captured 18% of the new car sales globally as of 2023. Reading follows the same model in terms of instructional methods. There is a method of teaching children to read that matches how children’s brains actually work in terms of reading and that is why it has been proven to be so effective for the majority of students.
As the balance of literacy approach in kindergarten programs are mainly of a haphazard nature and do not include any kind of systematic teaching of phonics, those 15 or so consonants and 3 to 4 vowels that children need to learn to sound out in order to read and write words do not get adequately covered. Data from the hundreds of education apps that are reviewed annually by TechRadar shows that teaching children to read using phonics in an explicit, step by step manner is far superior to trying to teach them to read using games. If an app does anything to support the kind of reading instruction that is best provided in a systematic and explicit fashion by a qualified teacher, then it is being used correctly.
Red Flag 5: Can’t Blend Two Sounds Together
By late kindergarten your child will also understand to orally combine two sounds. Children that can only make up 3 letter words by end of kindergarten, such as “bat,” and cannot read the word “cat” in the following format: /c/ /at/ within the first few weeks of first grade will develop reading difficulties by mid of first grade.
Similarly, there are many design tools available on the web to create designs without having any technical skills. Such tools like to break down complex processes and to complete in simple steps. For the example of blending above, a teacher can first teach children to blend the onset and the rime /c/ /at/ to form the word “cat.” Later, the children can learn to blend the individual phonemes /c/ /a/ /t/ to form the same word “cat.” Studies have found that only about 40% of children can learn to blend sounds automatically by the end of kindergarten; the other 60% need to be taught how to do so.
What Most People Get Wrong About Kindergarten Reading
There are several reading myths or misconceptions which are still widespread among parents and teachers, despite mountains of research which have addressed these same issues for decades. Here are some of the most important reading facts which indicate that children will not “click” or automatically learn how to read when they are “ready” – and which also explain why reading must be taught to most children.
F3. Lack of systematic phonics in kindergarten literacy program. Until such time that a child’s brain is able to decipher printed words on their own, phonics is something that must be taught explicitly to most children. Reading and writing are not skills that children develop like walking or talking. Torgesen states that waiting until the child starts first grade is three times harder that doing in kindergarten! “Readiness” is not age or grade level, it is the child’s development of skills prior to reading. The “reading wars” have been over for about 20 years – in the research literature. But it seems that many schools are still stuck fighting using the same failed approaches.
Many articles have said that the best thing to do is wait and that eventually, reading will “click” for your child. However, the reality is that the majority of children require explicit teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics. Research indicates that those children who are never exposed to print in positive ways before kindergarten will struggle in reading in grade school. While it is the responsibility of the teacher to teach reading in kindergarten, it is also the responsibility of the parent to observe their child’s progress and to request a reading assessment by the end of the school year if their child is showing signs of reading difficulty. It is far better to intervene in kindergarten than to wait until your child is in first grade and then have to implement three years of interventions. A colleague in reading suggested to me that the best thing to do is to follow your child’s lead and request a reading assessment by the end of the school year if your child exhibits three or more of the reading red flags by the end of kindergarten.
One thing to know is that the difference between readers who are strong and those who are struggling by the end of 3rd grade is enormous. Children who enter kindergarten without basic phonemic awareness skills and letter knowledge (despite having been repeatedly read to and exposed to print in preschool) rarely ever “catch up” as they get older, and typically require intense, individualized reading intervention. Many well intentioned kindergarten teachers will tell parents that “every child is different” and that some just need to be “more physical” or “hands-on” learners who happen to be “a type of learner that requires a lot of hands-on activity with literacy” and therefore do not yet need to be learning to read in kindergarten. What these teachers are failing to realize is that by the time their students reach 2nd grade, the differences that existed in kindergarten between their students who were “ready to read” and those who were not will have become deficits.
Sources and References
Michael Adams (1990) provides in Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print a sophisticated and thorough insight into the early years of reading and the many facets involved.
National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Sénéchal, M., & LeFevre, J. (2002). Parental involvement in the development of children’s reading skill: A five-year longitudinal study. Child Development, 73(2), 445-460.
Torgesen, J. K. (2004). Avoiding the devastating downward spiral: The evidence that early intervention prevents reading failure. American Educator, 28(3), 6-19.
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