Is my child reading or just guessing? It’s probably not a question you thought you’d need to ask when your child first started bringing home little readers from school. They say the word on the page, you celebrate, everyone moves on with their lives.
But sometimes, what looks like reading isn’t quite reading. Your child sees horse and says house. Or the sentence is about a dog, and they confidently say puppy when the word on the page is pet. It makes sense and it sounds plausible. And if you’re making dinner, answering an email and supervising homework at the same time, you might not even notice.
That’s what can make guessing tricky to spot.
What Does Reading Actually Look Like?
First, your child shouldn’t have to sound out every word they read.
As reading becomes fluent, your child recognizes more and more words automatically. They see a familiar word and know it immediately.
But what happens when they encounter a word they don’t recognize?
That’s where decoding comes in. Your child uses what they know about letters, sounds and spelling patterns to work out the unfamiliar word.
Both automatic word recognition and decoding are part of skilled reading.
Guessing is not.
Instead of reading the entire word, your child might use the first letter, the shape of the word, a picture, or what would make sense in the sentence and take a guess.
Is My Child Reading or Just Guessing?
You might notice your child:
- substitutes a similar-looking word
- says a word that makes sense in the sentence but isn’t actually there
- relies heavily on pictures
- gets the first sound right but guesses the rest
- struggles much more with unfamiliar words
Occasional mistakes happen to everyone. What matters is whether you’re seeing a pattern.
Try a Made-Up Word
Here’s a simple way to get a little more information.
Give your child a made-up word, a nonsense word, such as mip, vem or nup.
Why something ridiculous like mip? Because your child has never seen it before. They can’t recognize it automatically, and there’s no picture or sentence to help them guess, so they have to decode it.
If your child can look at mip, connect the letters to their sounds and blend those sounds together, you’re seeing their decoding skills at work.
So if that’s easy, try a two-syllable nonsense word, such as nupteg or mipvem. Now your child has to decode each part and blend the two syllables together.
The goal isn’t to stump them. You’re simply getting a glimpse of what your child does when they encounter a word they couldn’t possibly already know.
Does Guessing Mean My Child Has Dyslexia?
No.
October is Dyslexia Awareness Month, so it’s a good time to talk about this. Difficulty decoding unfamiliar words can be one clue that leads us to look more closely at your child’s reading skills, but a nonsense-word activity at your kitchen table is not a dyslexia test.
So if you’re wondering, “Is my child reading or just guessing?”, start by paying attention to the kinds of mistakes they make. If you’re noticing signs of guessing, try a few nonsense words to get a better look at how your child handles words they can’t already know.
If decoding those unfamiliar words is difficult, dig a little deeper. Talk to your child’s teacher about what they’re seeing at school and ask specifically about their decoding skills. You may also want to look more closely at which foundational reading skills are strong and which ones still need development.
And if you’re not sure how to figure that out, The Open Door Educational Services can help. We can look at your child’s reading skills, help identify where the difficulty may be coming from, and talk with you about what the next steps could look like.
You don’t need to diagnose the problem yourself. You just need to notice when something deserves a closer look.
If your child is guessing instead of reading, the important question isn’t what they got wrong. It’s why they needed to guess in the first place.
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