How to Help Older Students Who Struggle With Reading and Spelling Catch Up Quickly in 2026

lucas398q3
Jan 3
6 min read

Why do older students still struggle with reading and spelling, even when they’re bright and capable? How can you help them get caught up?

In This Post

Why Older Students Get Missed

Why Guessing Hurts Struggling Readers

Why Spelling is Still Hard

How Teens with Dyslexia Can Learn to Decode Quickly

What This Means for ACT and SAT Prep

A Message for Parents Who Feel They “Should Have Known”

Many parents are shocked when a new neuropsychological or psychoeducational evaluation finally explains what is going on. Their preteen or teenager has dyslexia. It feels unexpected. After all, your child is bright, articulate, funny, perceptive and capable, and has been getting good grades. You might have felt over the years like they could have been doing better in school, given how bright they are. Teachers probably said things like “She’ll grow out of it” or “He just needs to slow down.” Nothing ever seemed serious enough to explain why reading and spelling were always harder than they should have been.

If this is your family, give yourself a little grace. It's not your fault, and you didn't miss anything. Many older students who are diagnosed with dyslexia in middle or high school compensated beautifully for years because their strengths masked the foundational skills they never truly learned. These students seem fine until the workload gets heavier in middle or high school. Then everything feels harder at once. But the strong vocabulary, memory, reasoning, background knowledge and verbal skills that supported their reading all these years and helped prevent you from noticing the reading issues will continue to help them as they learn those missing foundational skills.

And here's the best part: those very strengths often help teens catch up faster than younger students once they finally receive the right instruction.

Why Older Students Get Missed

For many families, the story is the same. Their child was smart, understood complex ideas, loved stories and could talk through a novel with ease. What teachers didn't always see was the effort behind the scenes. These students relied on context clues, pictures, memory and partial decoding to move through text. In elementary school, the words are short enough and predictable enough for those strategies to work. By middle school (or, for some students, high school), that's no longer enough.

This is why so many dyslexic students aren't identified until grades six through twelve. They have strong related skills and are able to compensate for weak decoding skills for years, until it all just gets to be too hard.

At Kids Up Reading Tutors, we work with many preteens and teens who were only recently diagnosed. They're often relieved when someone finally explains why reading and spelling have always felt so effortful. They are even more relieved to discover that their challenges are absolutely solvable with the right approach.

Why Guessing Hurts Struggling Readers

Many older students have been encouraged for years, often unintentionally, to guess at words rather than sound them out. It might look like reading, but it slows progress dramatically.

Guessing words based on the pictures or the topic or what makes sense in that sentence teaches students to use everything except the letters on the page.

Decoding, on the other hand, teaches students to rely on the letters first and then use context to fine-tune the result. This shift is life-changing. Teens with dyslexia need explicit, systematic instruction in phonological skills and phonics so they can unlock unfamiliar words independently. When we teach middle and high school students to truly sound out words, not guess based on the first few letters, the context or the length or shape of the word, their confidence rises quickly.

Why Spelling is Still Hard

Nearly every older struggling reader is also a struggling speller. This is not a character trait. It is a skills gap. Spelling is also called "encoding," and is basically the opposite of decoding. If a student has never been taught how sounds map to letters and phonics patterns, spelling will always feel unpredictable.

Older students often say things like “I know the letters, just not the order.” That's not a motivation issue or a memory issue. No one can memorize how to spell the many words in our wonderful, rich language that has borrowed and adapted words from Latin, Greek, German, French and so many other languages! Once students develop strong phonological skills and learn morphology (how we create words using prefixes, base/root words and suffixes) and the rules that govern English spelling, spelling becomes much easier to understand and more predictable. They stop limiting themselves to short, simple words and start writing in a way that reflects their curiosity, creativity and knowledge.

How Teens with Dyslexia Can Learn to Decode Quickly

Families are often surprised to hear that students who are diagnosed with dyslexia in middle or high school often catch up more quickly than students who are diagnosed in elementary school. That's because these pre-teens and teens bring powerful strengths to the table, including all of those skills that helped them "get by" in reading all of these years, plus longer attention spans, greater motivation to change their academic experience and better awareness of the stakes, including grades and scores on the ACT and SAT.

Parents looking for tutoring for their older student should be sure to look for a program that uses Orton-Gillingham and also does phonological training for the vast majority of students with dyslexia who have poor phonological skills. Many programs use Orton-Gillingham alone, but research and experience show that most students get caught up much more quickly when OG is paired with a comprehensive phonological training program like Kilpatrick or Heggerty.

Kids Up Reading Tutors uses high-intensity, 1-on-1 instruction grounded in the Science of Reading with Orton-Gillingham and Kilpatrick to teach older students the phonological skills, phonics, morphology, fluency and spelling rules they need to learn in order to become fluent readers, good spellers and confident students. Their instruction is systematic, explicit and fast-paced. Sessions move quickly, target only the skills the student needs, and build momentum week after week. Teens appreciate the clear, direct instruction with age-appropriate materials.

What This Means for ACT and SAT Preparation

Parents of high-achieving teens often reach out to Kids Up Reading Tutors when standardized tests are on the horizon. Reading efficiency, decoding accuracy and spelling weaknesses can affect performance long before a student even begins formal ACT or SAT prep.

The good news is that when older students finally learn to decode and spell accurately, their comprehension expands, their reading speed increases, their ability to analyze text improves and they are more likely to do the optional essay sections on standardized tests. The foundational work they do with Kids Up Reading Tutors becomes a direct advantage in test prep programs. Families often choose to complete the reading/spelling intervention before working with an ACT or SAT tutor, so their student can get the most benefit from higher-level test prep.

A Message to Parents

Parents often wonder whether they could have caught this earlier. Please don't worry. You weren't trained to see the signs of dyslexia, most dyslexic pre-teens and teens are extraordinary compensators, and most importantly - it's not too late!

Here is what you can feel confident about. Older students can make enormous progress quickly. They mature into the process. They want the independence that strong reading and spelling provide. They thrive when someone finally teaches them in the way their brain learns best, and they truly appreciate learning those foundational reading skills they've been missing all these years. In our experience, high school students working with Kids Up Reading Tutors really appreciate and look forward to their tutoring sessions and often tell their parents that the tutoring they're doing is life-changing.

So please don't worry. Your timing isn't wrong. You are right on time.

What Sets Kids Up Reading Tutors Apart?

Evidence-based instruction with Orton-Gillingham+
- Based on the Science of Reading
- Data-driven systematic, explicit instruction
- For all learners, with or without dyslexia/dysgraphia

Kids & teens get caught up ASAP
- Customized, 1-on-1 sessions with a dedicated tutor
- High-intensity tutoring (2-5x/week) via Zoom
- Focused, with an end in sight (not endless tutoring & investment)