Your Child Isn’t Reading—They’re Just Memorizing (And It’s About to Stop Working)

Added: 2026-04-28

[00:00:00]They might have memorized words like bike and like and ate, but they have no idea that silent E makes the vowel long.

[00:00:08]Really Great Reading has a free nonsense word phonics assessment and it has a multiple pieces in it so that you can do benchmarking throughout the year and see if your intervention is working.

[00:00:21]This profile tends to get worse as students get older because those who struggle with reading words or reading in general typically don't read that much. It's a struggle. It overwhelms the working memory and the cognitive load and they don't want to do it.

[00:00:37]And the problem is is that majority of the vocabulary that we gain comes from reading. And when you don't read, your vocabulary doesn't grow and your understanding of complex sentences doesn't grow. And so it's almost like when you hear really complicated text read aloud you don't understand what's going on because you haven't had practice with it.