How to help a 3rd grader who is struggling with reading

Third grade is the year reading stops being the lesson and starts carrying every other one. Here is what is normal, what the benchmarks are, and what helps when your child is behind.

For parents · Grade 3

If your 3rd grader is struggling with reading, the first thing to find out is which part is hard: reading the words, reading them smoothly, or understanding them. Each needs different help, and it takes about five minutes at home to tell them apart.

The second thing to know is that it is worth acting on now rather than waiting. Third grade is when reading stops being the lesson and becomes the way every other lesson is delivered.

Why third grade matters

The reading researcher Jeanne Chall described reading development in stages: in the early grades children are learning to read, and from around fourth grade they are reading to learn. Textbooks in science and social studies start to assume a child can read them, and the words get longer, rarer and less likely to come with a picture.

A child who is still working hard to decode in Grade 3 meets that change with most of their attention spent on the words, and little left over for what the words mean. Chall's research also described a "fourth-grade slump": children from low-income families who had kept pace in Grades 2 and 3 began falling behind from Grade 4, once texts became more demanding.

There is a well-known statistic attached to this. A 2011 report for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Double Jeopardy by Donald Hernandez, followed nearly 4,000 students and found that children who were not reading proficiently by the end of third grade were about four times as likely not to have finished high school by age 19 as those who were. That is a correlation across a large group, not a forecast for your child — but it is the reason schools, and some state laws, pay so much attention to this year.

What a 3rd grade reading level looks like

The middle of the range, in words correct per minute (WCPM), from the Hasbrouck & Tindal (2017) norms that most US schools use:

The full benchmark table has every grade. Two things to notice. The middle grows by about 30 words a minute across the year — less than in Grade 2, because the job is shifting from speed to handling harder text. And always compare against the right season: a September reader at 85 is right in the middle; the same score in May is below the 25th.

Beyond speed, by the end of Grade 3 most children:

• Read grade-level text accurately — around 95% of words or better
• Break longer words into parts: un-hap-py, re-mem-ber, in-vi-ta-tion
• Know the common prefixes and suffixes: re-, un-, dis-, -ful, -less, -tion
• Read in phrases, with expression that matches the meaning
• Read chapter books silently and can tell you what happened
• Read non-fiction to find something out, not just stories

Those last points line up with the US Common Core foundational skills for Grade 3, which expect children to decode multisyllable words and read grade-level text with accuracy, appropriate rate and expression. If your school reports reading levels as letters or Lexile numbers instead, reading levels by grade translates them.

The Grade 3 problem: long words

The most common Grade 3 difficulty is not short words. It is long ones.

Many children get through Grades 1 and 2 by recognizing lots of short words and filling the gaps from pictures and context. In Grade 3 that stops working. The words are longer, the pictures go, and the child starts to skip words, guess from the first few letters — "instruction" for introduction — or slow to a crawl. Their reading of a page sounds nearly right, and their understanding of it quietly drops.

What fixes it

Teach them to chunk. Cover all but the first part of a long word with your finger, read it, then reveal the next part. Fan-tas-tic. Most children have never been shown that long words are built from short pieces they can already read.

Teach the common word parts. A few prefixes and suffixes cover a great many words. Once a child knows that -tion says "shun", a whole family of words opens up.

Read the same passage several times across a week. Repeated reading is still the best-evidenced fluency practice in Grade 3. The first read is work; by the third, the long words are familiar and the sentence starts to sound like speech.

Model the phrasing. If they read accurately but one word at a time, read a sentence well, then have them read it straight back. Child reads word by word and reading with expression go into this in detail.

Keep reading to them. A Grade 3 child can understand much harder books than they can read. Reading aloud above their level is how they keep building the vocabulary and background knowledge that Grade 4 will ask for.

If your third grader is reading below grade level

Check accuracy before speed. Have them read an unfamiliar Grade 3 passage aloud for one minute, and put the result into our words per minute calculator. It gives you both numbers.

• Accuracy under about 90% — the problem is decoding, not fluency. The text is too hard, the speed figure means nothing, and more reading practice alone will not fix it. They need direct phonics work at the right level; how to teach phonics at home covers the order. Raise it with the teacher.
• Accuracy fine, speed low — that is a genuine fluency problem, and the five things above are the answer. See how to improve reading fluency.
• Both fine, but they cannot tell you what they read — that is comprehension, a different problem again. See reading comprehension strategies.

If school has sent home a screening score you do not understand, DIBELS scores explained walks through it. And if decoding is still effortful in Grade 3 despite good teaching, especially with a family history of reading difficulty, look at signs of dyslexia in children and ask the school directly about it.

Ten to fifteen minutes, most days

Short and regular beats long and occasional. Ten to fifteen minutes of reading aloud, most days, with somebody listening, does more than an hour on Saturday.

Listening is the part that matters. By Grade 3 children are expected to read silently, and a struggling reader reading silently gets no help on the stuck word, no feedback on phrasing, and no sense that they are getting better. If an adult cannot be there every day, a reading tutor or a reading fluency app for kids that actually listens can cover the gap — ours scores each read against the Grade 3 benchmarks above, which makes "is it working?" a question with an answer.

When to ask the school for more

If you have practiced consistently for six to eight weeks and the numbers have not moved, ask the teacher directly: is my child's progress what you would expect, and what extra help is available? Ask what the school's own screening shows. In the US you can request an evaluation in writing, and the school has to respond.

Do not accept "they will catch up" without a plan. Some children do. The ones who do not lose a year they need.

What to avoid

• Harder books "to stretch them". Stretch comes from reading text they can manage, fluently and often.
• Correcting every word as it happens. It breaks the sentence and the confidence. Give them about three seconds, then supply the word and carry on.
• Treating silent reading as practice. It is the goal. You cannot hear a problem you cannot hear.
• Minutes logged as the measure. Progress is words correct per minute, and accuracy, a few weeks apart — not time spent.
• Letting it become a fight. A third grader who has decided they hate reading is harder to help than one who is simply behind. If that is already happening, see what to do when a child hates reading.

For how Grade 3 fits into the years before and after, see reading milestones by age and how to help a 2nd grader with reading.

Free chart from myfluentreader.com — reading fluency benchmarks, a words-per-minute calculator and the full sight-word lists, free and without signing up.