Online Reading Tutoring for Middle and High School Students
Grades 5-12. It's Never Too Late to Build Foundational Skills.
Why Do Some Middle and High Schoolers Struggle to Read?
Students are no longer learning to read; they're reading to learn. Textbooks get denser, novels get longer, and every subject from biology to history starts asking students to pull meaning out of pages of unfamiliar words. High school raises the bar again, with primary sources, timed tests, and reading loads that assume the foundational skills are already automatic.
For many students who never fully learned to decode, middle school or high school is when the workarounds stop working. They may have been sounding out the first few letters and guessing the rest, leaning on pictures, context, and memory to get through. Those strategies hold up fine when the words are short and predictable. They fall apart when the word is "photosynthesis" or "unconstitutional." Kids Up Reading Tutors provides online reading tutoring for middle and high school students in grades 5-12 (plus some college students) who need to learn those foundational reading skills. Some of our students have dyslexia; others don't.
"Since starting with Kids Up, both children have shown remarkable progress in reading and spelling,
and have gained significant confidence in tackling their schoolwork. We especially appreciate their
expertise in supporting kids with dyslexia and dysgraphia, and their familiarity with the challenges of
high school and college coursework. The flexible online, Zoom, and virtual tutoring options have
made it easy to fit sessions into our busy schedules."
8th Grade and College Freshman, Easton, MD
If You're Just Finding Out Now, You Didn't Miss Anything
Plenty of parents come to us feeling like they should have caught this years ago. Please set that down. Bright students are remarkable compensators, and many of them coast for years on strong vocabulary, excellent memory, deep background knowledge, sharp reasoning, and the kind of verbal skill that makes a fifth grader sound like they've read the book when they've mostly absorbed the class discussion. Teachers often don't see the effort happening underneath. Report cards look fine. Nothing looks serious enough to investigate.
That's exactly why so many students aren't identified until grades 5 through 12. The compensating was working, right up until the volume of reading made it impossible to keep up. And here's the part worth holding onto: every one of those strengths that hid the problem is still there, and every one of them will help your student become a fluent, confident reader.
Older Students Often Catch Up More Quickly
Families are usually surprised to hear this, but in our experience at Kids Up, students who made it to high school before their parents realized they were struggling with reading frequently learn those missing foundational reading skills faster than students who were diagnosed with dyslexia as first or second graders.
That makes sense when you look at what these older students bring to a session:
-
The vocabulary, background knowledge, and reasoning skills that masked the gap for years
-
A longer attention span and the stamina for focused, fast-paced work
-
Real motivation, because they understand what's at stake with grades, test scores, and college
-
The maturity to work on foundational skills without feeling embarrassed about it, with instruction that respects their age
Tutoring struggling readers at this age isn't about starting over. It's about finding the specific skills that they haven't yet learned and teaching those skills efficiently, with materials that reflect their maturity level.
"Maria looks forward to her tutoring sessions.
I have not had one day of pushback or debate! She has improved and her confidence has
skyrocketed when it comes to reading in class. We are thrilled :)"
7th Grade, Wendell, NC
What Middle and High School Reading Tutoring Looks Like at Kids Up
Every student starts with a literacy evaluation so we know exactly which skills they've got and which they still need to learn, then works one-on-one with their dedicated tutor over Zoom. Depending on what the evaluation shows, middle school and high school reading/dyslexia tutoring sessions may include:
-
Phonological training. Most students who are struggling with reading have weak phonological skills. We use Kilpatrick phonological awareness program to teach these skills.
-
Multisyllabic decoding. Breaking long academic words into syllables and morphemes so that unfamiliar vocabulary stops being a guessing game.
-
Spelling and morphology. Prefixes, roots, suffixes, and the rules that make English spelling predictable. Nearly every older struggling reader is also a struggling speller, and this is where that changes.
-
Reading fluency. Accuracy, pace, and expression, so that mental energy goes to understanding the text instead of identifying each word.
-
Comprehension that rests on real decoding. Once words come off the page accurately and automatically, comprehension work actually sticks.
Our tutors are trained in Orton-Gillingham and Kilpatrick, and instruction is explicit, systematic, and multisensory. Families searching for dyslexia tutoring or for Orton-Gillingham tutors online often find programs that use Orton-Gillingham by itself. We pair it with phonological training because that combination is what most older struggling readers and spellers need.
What This Means for the ACT and SAT
Reading speed and decoding accuracy affect standardized test performance long before a student opens a prep book. On a timed test, a student who is still working to identify words is spending energy that a confident reader spends on the actual question.
When older students learn to decode and spell accurately, reading gets faster and less effortful, and the analysis the ACT and SAT ask for becomes much more accessible. Many families choose to do reading and spelling tutoring first, before they work with an ACT or SAT tutor. Confident readers simply have more room to think on test day
What Ages and Grades Does Kids Up Work With?
Kids Up works with students in grades 1-12, including many in grades 5-12 . Middle and high school students come to us with a recent dyslexia diagnosis, with a long-standing one, or with no diagnosis at all. No diagnosis is required to start. We do an up front literacy evaluation to guide our instruction that is not a medical or psychoeducational evaluation.
We also work with a small number of college students who are finally getting the foundational reading and spelling instruction they need.
"I [Marco] really enjoyed meeting with you every week where you’d always try to stump me with different
made up words. Hopefully once my schedule dies down I will be able to continue working with you.
I really appreciate everything you have done to build my confidence in reading."
11th Grade
Frequently asked questions
