Referring to existing practical experience with reading classes and reading schools and to findings from research about designs of effective educational arrangements a three-month intensive support for students in 3rd grade with difficulties in reading and spelling was developed and tested for its efficacy in a control group design. In addition to cognitive abilities and performance in reading and spelling data about subjective well-being and academic self-concept have been collected. The sample contained 31 children.The spelling performance of the participating students significantly improved by the intensive training and remained steady over at least six months. At the beginning of the study the reading skills have been in a barely age-appropriate range and remained constant during the entire study period. The values of the investigated personality traits have also been age-appropriate and didn’t change over the period of training: only the variables “joy of learning” and “academic self-concept” decreased in the follow-up investigation, but still remained within the normal and inconspicuous range.The participating children left the intensive training courses with on average age-appropriate reading and spelling performances. The underachievement in spelling didn’t cause any undue psychological burden on the children and didn’t yet affect the academic self-concept.