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When Learning to Read Doesn't Look the Way We Expected: What I Learned as an SLP and a Mom

By Danielle Malkmus, MS, CCC-SLP

It can be incredibly frustrating, disheartening, and even alarming, when our children head off to school excited to learn, only to struggle with the way reading is being taught.

I know this not only as a speech-language pathologist, but as a mother.

When my own son was learning to read, there were moments that stopped me in my tracks.

He had a particularly difficult time remembering sight words and spelling rules. He might carefully tap out the sounds in c-a-t and then blend those sounds together, only to come up with a completely different word.

As a clinician, I recognized that these weren't simply moments of “not paying attention” or “not trying hard enough.”

As his mother, however, those same moments felt different.

Alarm bells went off.

I knew there was something about the way he was learning that wasn't working for him.

Knowing what a child is struggling with isn't always enough

After years as a school-based SLP, I had seen this pattern before.

A child might be bright, curious, verbal, and eager to participate—and still struggle with some of the earliest building blocks of reading.

They may have difficulty remembering letter-sound relationships.

They may struggle to consistently recall sight words.

They may know individual sounds but have difficulty blending them into a word.

They may learn something one day and seem unable to retrieve it the next.

And sometimes, these difficulties are mistaken for a lack of attention, effort, maturity, or motivation.

The reality is that learning to read is not equally easy for every child.

Some children need more explicit instruction in how sounds, letters, words, and spelling patterns fit together. Children with dyslexia and other reading disorders may have particular difficulty with traditional approaches that rely heavily on memorization, guessing, or implicit discovery. Children with attention or language-processing difficulties may also need instruction that is more structured, explicit, repetitive, and multisensory.

That doesn't mean these children aren't capable of learning to read.

It means we may need to change the way we teach them.

My son's experience changed the way I practice

Watching my own child struggle made this personal in a way that years of clinical experience couldn't quite replicate.

I made a decision:

I wanted to understand not just that a child was struggling with reading, but why—and what I could do differently to help.

That led me to pursue training in Wilson Reading System and structured literacy, building on the extensive foundation I already had in speech and language development, phonological awareness, sound acquisition, and the linguistic components underlying reading and spelling.

It was a natural extension of the work I had already been doing.

Speech-language pathologists spend years studying how children learn and organize sounds, words, language, and meaning. Reading draws on many of these same underlying systems.

Structured literacy gave me another lens through which to understand the children I was seeing.

Rather than expecting a child to simply memorize more words or “pick up” reading patterns through exposure, we can explicitly teach the structure of our language.

We can make the invisible pieces visible.

We can connect sounds to letters, letters to patterns, patterns to words, and words to meaning.

And we can give children repeated opportunities to practice those connections in ways that engage multiple pathways for learning.

Reading should build confidence—not erode it

One of the things that stays with me most from working with struggling readers is how quickly academic difficulty can become emotional difficulty.

A child who repeatedly experiences failure can begin to believe that they are simply “bad at reading.”

They may avoid books.

They may guess instead of decode.

They may become frustrated before they've even begun.

They may decide that reading is something other kids can do—but not them.

I don't want that experience for my own children.

And I don't want it for the children who walk through my doors.

At Point Speech Pathology & Literacy Lab, my goal is not simply to help children read more words.

It is to help them understand how reading works, give them the tools they need to approach difficult words with confidence, and create enough successful experiences that they begin to see themselves differently.

Because learning to read is so much more than an academic milestone.

It is a life-changing skill.

Every child deserves the opportunity to experience the confidence that comes from realizing:

I can figure this out.

And sometimes, helping a child get there begins with looking at their struggle through a different lens—and changing the way we teach them.