Free parent resource · 24 pages
Free Reading Checklist
A simple checklist to help you spot exactly where your child is struggling
You already know reading is hard in your house. What you may not know is whether the difficulty starts with sounds, letters, blending, word reading, fluency, comprehension, confidence, or focus.
Until you know that, every decision about how to help is a guess.
- Eight reading areas, in the order reading actually develops
- A strengths page before any list of difficulties
- Two parent observation pages
- A next-step guide matched to what you find
No cost. Unsubscribe any time.
If this sounds familiar
“Something is wrong, and I don’t know what”
Maybe your child avoids reading. Maybe they guess at words. Maybe they know every letter sound perfectly but cannot push those sounds together into a word. Maybe they read the whole page correctly and then cannot tell you a single thing that happened in it.
That sentence is exhausting, because there is nothing you can actually do with it.
This checklist replaces it with something you can act on.
The short explanation
Reading is not one skill. It’s a stack.
Skills build on each other, and a difficulty low in the stack shows up as trouble everywhere above it. A child who cannot blend sounds will look like a child with poor comprehension — because every scrap of attention is going into working out the words, and there is nothing left over for meaning.
That is why this checklist walks through eight areas in order, rather than asking you one big question about “reading.” It helps you tell those two very different situations apart.
What you’ll be able to see
Eight areas. One clear pattern.
Every area page includes three worked examples of what that difficulty actually looks like at the kitchen table.
Sound awareness
Hearing and working with spoken sounds, before any print is involved.
Letter–sound knowledge
Knowing which sound each letter represents, reliably and quickly.
Blending & decoding
Turning separate sounds into a whole word. The most common sticking point.
Word recognition
Whether familiar words are becoming automatic, or rebuilt from scratch every time.
Fluency
Reading smoothly enough to have attention left over for meaning.
Comprehension
Whether meaning is actually arriving — and how that compares with listening.
Confidence & avoidance
What your child now believes about themselves as a reader.
Focus & routine
The conditions around practice, which change everything.
The page most parents skip
It starts with what your child can already do
The first list in the download is not a list of problems. It is sixteen things your child may already be able to do — listening to stories, rhyming, retelling events, using rich spoken vocabulary, trying again with encouragement.
This is not padding. Strengths tell you what to build on, and they often point to where the difficulty is not. A child who understands stories beautifully when you read aloud is showing strong language comprehension — which quietly suggests the difficulty sits in getting words off the page, rather than in understanding them.
No score. No rating.
See the shape, not a number
There is deliberately no score in this checklist. A number would suggest a precision it does not have, and it would tempt you to compare your child against a figure rather than against last month.
What you are looking for is shape — which areas are crowded with checks, and which are mostly clear. If your checks cluster low in the stack, that is where to start. If almost everything is checked, that usually points to a system rather than one skill.
Ten minutes of watching
What you see is better than what you remember
Ticking boxes from memory is useful. Watching one short, ordinary session and writing down what you actually see is better.
Two pages guide you through it: what happened when your child met an unknown word, what happened after a mistake, what seemed easiest, what seemed hardest, what helped, and the one thing you will change next time.
If you repeat the observation in a month, you will have something real to compare against — instead of a vague sense of whether things are better.
What to do with what you find
One starting point, matched to your pattern
Concerns clustered in sounds and letters point somewhere different from concerns clustered in fluency or confidence. The guide says so plainly, rather than pushing every parent toward the same thing.
The most common mistake at this stage is starting four things at once. Pick the single area sitting lowest in the reading stack, give it four to six weeks of short consistent practice, and then come back to the checklist and see what has changed.
Included free
Ten questions to take to your child’s teacher
Teachers see your child in a different setting, with different material and different comparisons available. Specific questions get far better answers than “how is their reading?”
The download includes a separate two-page printable with ten questions and space to write the answers down while you are still in the room.
Four files
Everything you get
Digital fillable edition
24 pages. Type straight into every box and save it. Tappable contents.
Full-colour printable
The same 24 pages, formatted for US Letter.
Ink-saving printable
Identical content using roughly 69% less ink.
Teacher question sheet
A separate two-page printable with room to write the answers.
Suitable for parents of children roughly ages 5–10, including children who are neurodivergent or who have been struggling for a long time.
Please read this before you download
This is an educational observation tool, not an assessment. There is no score, no risk rating, and nothing in it can tell you whether your child has dyslexia, ADHD, a language disorder, or any other condition.
Children show these behaviours for many reasons — including tiredness, the difficulty of the book in front of them, how much instruction they have had so far, and simply being at an earlier stage than the child sitting next to them at school.
If your concerns are persistent, significant, or are affecting school progress or emotional well-being, please speak with your child’s teacher or another appropriately qualified professional. This checklist is designed to help you have that conversation with better information — not to replace it.
Written by Mrs. Nathalie
An experienced tutor with more than twenty years of work alongside struggling readers, neurodivergent learners, and children of every learning style.
Everything in the Your Tutor At Home library is written for parents at the kitchen table — practical, calm, and free of jargon.
Before you ask
Common questions
How long does it take?
What if I tick boxes in every section?
Do I need to print it?
My child is older than ten.
Will this tell me if my child has dyslexia?
What does it cost?
Get your Free Reading Checklist
Twenty minutes of careful looking, and you will stop guessing about where to start.
No cost. Unsubscribe any time. Your email is never shared.
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