When a child struggles with literacy, it affects their confidence in every single subject. It’s often not a lack of effort, but a 'glitch' in how they process the sounds and structures of language. Look for these 10 indicators that your student may need a structured literacy approach: 1. "Guessing Game" Habit: They look at the first letter of a word and guess the rest based on the picture or the context, rather than sounding it out (e.g., reading "horse" as "house"). 2. Skipping the "Small" Words: They consistently skip or misread words like the, a, of, for, and an—the "glue" words that hold sentences together. 3. Spelling by Sight, Not Sound: They can pass a Friday spelling test by memorizing the letter strings, but cannot spell those same words correctly in a sentence on Monday. 4. Great Storyteller, Poor Writer: They can tell you a brilliant, complex story out loud, but when asked to write it down, they only produce a few simple, repetitive sentences. 5. The Reading "Wall": They seemed fine in 1st or 2nd grade when books were simple, but they are hitting a massive wall now that the text is more complex and has fewer pictures. 6. Slow and Labored Fluency: Reading feels like a "heavy lift." They put so much energy into decoding the individual words that they have no mental energy left to understand what they just read. 7. Letter & Number Reversals: Persistent confusion between letters like b/d, p/q or m/w, or writing numbers backward past the age where it is developmentally typical. 8. Vowel Confusion: They struggle to hear the difference between short vowel sounds (like the e in "pet" vs. the i in "pit"), leading to constant spelling and reading errors. 9. Avoidance of Reading Aloud: They become visibly anxious, frustrated, or "tired" the moment they are asked to read a passage out loud in front of others. 10. The "Disappearing" Ending: They often drop the suffixes of words while reading, ignoring the -ed, -ing, or -s at the end, which changes the entire meaning of the sentence.