What is the Best Way to Teach a (Young) Child to Read?

Factual Questions
1

I think my kid really wants to learn to read. He is almost three years old. He knows that letters spell words (“M-A-R-S spells Mars!”) and he knows that words represent objects/concepts. Lately he has been flipping through my books (no pictures) pretending to read aloud. He won’t let us read to him anymore, but just takes the books for himself and tries/pretends to do the reading himself. He has learned most of the phonetic sounds of the alphabet.

He’s ready, right?

Since I’m not sure reading is being taught effectively in schools (see link below), I feel we need to take this on ourselves.

I learned to read around his age, but I don’t remember how I learned. I do believe I was taught phonics by my English teacher grandmother, but I’m not sure if that ever sank in or if I just memorized a bunch of words. When I read now, am I really spelling things out phonetically? No, I imagine I’ve just memorized whole words. But I’m not sure.

I read an article recently about how context-based reading is not really evidence-based, but how solid is the evidence base around phonics? And what does this look like, practically? Our idea was to take index cards with letters to get him to repeat the sounds of different letters, then put them together to form familiar words. So he could read the difference between “cat” and “hat” for example, using the phonetics he had learned.

I don’t know if this will lead to him just memorizing the words, or if it matters. He has a great memory. Better than mine, currently (I’m old.) But like I said, I have no idea how I learned to read. I just remember it making immediate sense to my brain. I have to be cautious not to assume his brain works exactly like mine. I think he is probably neurodivergent (I have ADHD, he may or may not have ADHD or mild autism), but I’m not sure if that matters when it comes to a reading approach.

So yeah. Evidence-based advice solicited.

Thank you!

P.S. I want to be clear I’m not laboring under any delusion that reading at a young age is going to make a difference in his academic performance long-term. I just think he wants to do it, and I want to encourage him in his interests. And frankly, entertaining a two-year-old is monotonous. I think his Dad and I also want something fun to do with him.

2

I remember how my daughter, who is neurodivergent (autistic and ADHD), learned how to read. We read to her. A lot. She really enjoyed it. We let her see the words as we read them to her. She also watched videos of people reading books with the words displayed. It clicked for her that way.

Unfortunately, she does not have good strategies for when she doesn’t immediately know a word. She also doesn’t have very good “reading stamina” so she tends to not read for long periods of time. However, her vocabulary grows every day and she’s learning more strategies at school. She really likes nonfiction books, like books about science.

(More data - She could read in kindergarten but now tests as though she reads at a 1st grade level though she’s in 3rd grade and she can read way better than that. She just tests really really poorly.)

3

I’ve no idea what the current advice is. I know that my mother read to me, holding the book so that I could see it and running her finger along below the words so as to point to each word as she read it, and reading the actual words as printed instead of paraphrasing as I’ve heard some people do when reading to their children; and that I was reading by 3 1/2, with no further effort on either of our parts.

If your kid won’t let you read to him, of course, that isn’t much help. If you try just doing that, any chance that he’ll come read over your shoulder?

4

Children of a friend of mine who learned whole word reading, but weren’t too bright at it - I remember them making serious errors reading new material - Grade 8 or 9 and mistaking “origins” for “organisms”.

When I was in about grade 7, so about 1968, I believe I was in a study by OISE (Ontario Institute for Education) on whether whole word reading worked. We went to a classroom where there were these machines (presumably purpose-built) which would go through flimstrips of text, projecting them on a screen with a gizmo that blocked the entire page and would unblock / flash each word in the text in sequence for a short time. You could adjust the words-per-minute speed from slow to fast. Then we had to answer some reading comprehension questions at the end.

Thinking about it years later - the obvious flaw was that I was a serious bookworm at that age who read a lot and regularly. I wasn’t learning to read that way, I could just read normally that fast. Plus, I remember the text I did the best on was a short biography or Abraham Lincoln, since I’d recently read about him and knew some of the subject matter. Plus, this suggests to me the OISE people were replicating American experiments using borrowed equipment.

I don’t even remember how I learned to read, but both parents were university professors so it was quite early. I remember in first grade the teacher saying “you can practice your reading like Bob, who looks at the newspaper dad’s reading and says ‘I recognize the word “the” and “and” and…’”. And I’m thinking I had no problem already with “see Spot run” and almost every children’s book we had at home…

I had a bit of a problem with vocabulary; I got ragged on once in high school for example, because I’d encountered the word hyperbola for years before I realized it was pronounced "hy per bo la, not like the word hyper - hy per bo la. Bolas were the gaucho equivalent of a lasso.

My boss at one time was a very bright fellow, whose daughter turned out to be extremely bright too. (Top of her class, scholarships, yada yada…) He relates taking her for ice cream and passing the TV Repair van (remember those?) She’s only about 3, but she looks at the van and says “Hey. TV - that spells teevee!”

My opinion, for what it’s worth - if he’s already figuring out letter-to-phonics then help him to continue to learn that way, particularly warn him when he starts to encounter English’s notorious variants. If you have a particular sense of humour/humor, see if you can find lower grade level “word of the day” calendars?

5

Our son’s interest in books waxes and wanes. He goes through periods where he wants all the books and then loses interest for a while. But certainly we read to him a lot, when he lets us. He does let us read to him at bedtime, but at least for his Dad it is the same two books, with no variation, for the last year. He’s all over the place while we’re reading, running around the room, and gets upset when we stop, but is not actually paying attention, at least not in the classic sense of paying attention. Right now he is at peak interest, but his insistence on leading the process makes it difficult to teach him.

His true obsession is numbers. And I do mean obsession.

And in that way we are very different.

6

That sounds like a good thing to try.

7

I volunteered in elementary schools in college teaching kids to read, and this is how they taught us to teach. It’s called “blending.” You teach the individual sounds, then you show them a word and say OK look, we’vs got 3 letters, so that’s 3 sounds. Then you hold up 3 fingers and you go (thumb) C - that’s kuh. (Index) A - that’s aaaaaa. (Middle) T, that’s tuh.

Then as they get used to the idea, you sort of wiggle your fingers for them to encourage them to mash the sounds together quickly and “blend” them. Once CAT is easy, you just change one sound and all of a sudden all kinds of words open up.

8

He would really like this, because he loves to count. Tying numbers into anything makes him more interested.

9

When my kids were little, I read to them. Kids often like the same book read over and over, and before long I noticed my daughter was reading along.

Once they can read, then the next step is to encourage them to want to read. I used to take my kids to a local bookstore (do they still exist?) each Friday where they could choose a book and I would buy it for them. My daughter was always eager to get her next book, while my son sort of grudgingly would pick one so that he wasn’t left out.

10

Oh, yeah. In college, among friends, I pronounced “epitome” as “EH-pih-tome” and I could never live it down. I still have some words I’m not sure I pronounce correctly.

11

Pretty much this. I sat in my dad’s lap while he read the paper every day. He read it aloud to me some of the time but not always. Mom likes to tell about the day when I was three and my dad called to her, sounding very nervous or upset or something. She came in the room and he was looking scared and he said “she’s reading this to me.” Don’t know why it scared him. Maybe he was afraid I was a prodigy or something. Nope. Just a reader.

I think maybe the secret is just making reading seem like something fun your parents are doing so you want to do it too. Not stressful, fun. If it’s a “lesson” it won’t be fun.

12

I think people should not make fun of others for making good faith efforts at hard words. We should just gently correct and then move on. Because we have ALL done it. It’s like having something stuck in your teeth. Just let them know, don’t laugh about it.

Another thing to note - When your child gets to school, try not to put too much emphasis on the testing. Like I said, my daughter tests really poorly but she reads way better than she tests. She even retains a lot of it. She just doesn’t really care about why Sally had to change her clothes after being in the rain or whatever test passage they used.

OH and one more thing - If you think your child is on the spectrum and may need support, don’t be afraid to get them that support. If I remember correctly, we are in the same county so I might still have the number to call for early intervention. If they don’t need support then go ahead and ignore me. I’m an advocate for early intervention because I somehow didn’t realize that my child couldn’t communicate basically at all at 4 years old and don’t want anyone to go through what we went through.

13

We are trying. He needs a wide range of supports, the most serious being pediatric feeding disorder due to sensory processing issues, but I think he may need gross motor, problem solving and social interventions too. When he was 18 months he was not talking, so we took him for an evaluation with early intervention, but by the time we got there, he was in normal range. He seems to take longer with language but he caught up yet again just in the last month.

We have an appointment today with his occupational therapist to discuss his wide range of issues and figure out how to triage them. He’s been in OT for a year with limited improvement and won’t eat lunch at daycare. We have expressed concerns about autism to his pediatrician but he comes up borderline on her assessments. We have talked about it extensively and decided to put him in daycare for a few months and see whether he caught up at all. And he has caught up quickly in many areas in just three months.

Socially I don’t believe he is developmentally appropriate. He talks a lot and is less shy since he started daycare, but seems indifferent to his peers and doesn’t really do anything approaching back and forth conversation, even with adults, even with me. I can’t explain it, it just feels like he’s processing things differently. Many people we’ve discussed this with have brought up COVID related delays, but as I tried to explain it, I get that, and I see how that’s valid, but at the same time I feel there’s something underneath all that, that is fundamentally my son. Like this is who he is.

Then there is the obsession with number sequences. The kid has an intuitive sense for numbers extremely advanced for his age. I know that’s kind of an autism stereotype but it does give me pause. Numbers occupy serious real estate in his brain. He is usually more interested in arranging his toys into sequential numbers than imaginative play, and he becomes distressed when his pattern is the slightest bit off. Same with routines, which are becoming more and more elaborate and rigid.

He’s not a difficult child exactly because he’s very happy and his periods of upset don’t even last that long. Despite all of these issues I would describe him as more chill than the average toddler.

But yeah, we are definitely aware and trying to get him the supports he needs. It’s just… there’s so much there. I’m getting the feeling that the time has come for a global assessment by a specialist.

14

He definitely sounds ready. Our 6 year old started at about the same pace, maybe a little later. We found the Bob Books, and they were a huge hit. They each build on each other, so that you (and he) will see how words and blends build on each other.

15

Hijack:

I’m sorry if I made it sound easy. It’s not.

When it was us, I made that first call and said “Hi, I’d like to get my child evaluated for an IEP. She starts kindergarten in the fall and she is not potty trained.” and their reply was “Well, we will need more than that for an evaluation.” She hung up and I was absolutely floored. I had no idea how any of this was supposed to work and the lady on the phone expected me to just know shit. I had to call my friend who told me that I needed to talk about my daughter’s behaviors and how I was concerned about her ability to learn in a traditional setting. I had to learn the secret words. But once I learned them, I got her evaluated and it’s been a whirlwind ever since. I don’t have experience with feeding therapy but I do know that its a real thing that helps children. I hope you can get your son the help he needs.

End hijack.

Another thing about reading is training on stamina. With my daughter, we use timers to help her learn to read for longer. We also let her read what she likes to read at home. We don’t do required reading at home because we want reading to be fun. Right now, she’s reading lift the flap books about music.

16

I think a lot of people don’t realize that some (not all) children will learn to read easily, and without any intensive instruction, by somewhere between 3 and 4, so long as they have access to reading materials and are around people who read. Many people seem to think of reading as something Hard that requires careful teaching and that almost nobody’s capable of managing before 6 or so. There’s nothing wrong with a child who takes that long, but there’s nothing particularly odd about a 3 year old reader, either.

I was the youngest child, and everyone I knew read for pleasure as well as for usefulness. It no more occurred to me not to learn how to read than it would have occurred to me not to learn how to talk or how to walk.

Yup, exactly.

It’s fun, and it’s useful. You can Find Out Things. Little kids want to Find Out Things. (School, very unfortunately, all too often knocks that out of them instead of helping it along. I still have trouble, all these years later, making myself read something that I think I’m Supposed to read. Luckily, I had the love of reading embedded firmly enough before I went to school that I didn’t lose the active desire to read all sorts of things, just as long as I don’t think I Ought To.)

Yes, indeed. Anybody who reads a lot, at least in English, is going to have guessed the pronunciation of words wrong; because English is weird. I went quite a few years before I realized that the word pronounced “kernel” was, in some contexts, the same word as the one spelled “colonel”. I’m sure there are some that I’m still getting wrong.

17

I know I was reading by the time I was in kindergarten (age 5), but I don’t remember how or where I learned. It would not have been in school; I had an old-school kindergarten teacher who did not believe in teaching kindergarten-age kids to read.

I also don’t remember a time when I didn’t know that words were made of letters, which represented sounds, so that any time I was faced with an unfamiliar word I could try sounding it out. I would have thought that everybody who learned to read knew that, but the article that @Spice_Weasel linked in her OP seems to indicate otherwise, which strikes me as absolutely nucking futs.

18

Wait, are you my wife, and is that my kid? I think my wife likes to mispronounce words, because of instead of being embarrassed, she just persists her way.

My kid is also on the autism spectrum, and maybe has some ADHD. Early on she showed lots of interest in numbers, but I think the 2-4th grade practice of memorize all the tables has pushed some of that away. Hopefully it comes back when school math starts being more interesting.

My kid also does the thing where she is absolutely listening and understanding what is being said or read to her, but at the same time is fidgeting, playing with stuff, wiggling around the room, etc. It can be very distracting while reading to her. We had to draw the line at we won’t read to her if she’s reading something else

Anyway, to early reading. The school here always taught with a phonics method, and would talk about all of the education research saying it was the best method. My kid was interested in reading at about your’s age, but she didn’t like the work involved, so never really took to it until school.

How do you feel about screen time? There are lots of tablet games based around letter identification and sounds. I think one that was good is Endless Alphabet. There are lots, and some are truly free with no ads, but it can take some work to find them, and it’s been too long for me to remember which were good.

Another thing that we did, that sometimes was a huge success, and other times would lead to meltdowns, was having our kid “read” some of the books to us. At that age, she’d memorized all of her favorite books, so we’d have her read while following a finger on the page.

19

Maybe. We do try to limit screen time, but I think research shows it depends on the quality of what he’s watching. So I’m not necessarily opposed to electronic tools to help.

20

My two older kids were only 17 months apart. My daughter, the older, started talking a bit by 15-16 months and was pretty fluent by 24 months. Son didn’t talk at all (but obviously understood everything) at 23 months and at 24 months was talking fluently.

That’s just background. My wife and I alternated reading to them both every evening. Relatively advanced things like Pooh and Swallows and Amazons. We made no effort to have them look at what we were reading or running fingers under the text. But, quite suddenly, son was reading at age 4. Daughter claimed she couldn’t read. One day, my wife noticed the boy reading something to his sister. He made a mistake and she corrected him. My wife then asked her to read the book to her. She giggled, “You know I can’t read.” “Well try”. She tried and and of course was reading well.

We made no attempt to teach them phonics, but they obviously absorbed it. People who have been taught by the “whole word” method cannot tell children from chicken. They start and end the same way and have the same general shape in the middle. Once I was eating at a restaurant with a bunch of mathematicians, all with PhDs and faculty positions. The guy sitting next to me tried to order a “hamburger granite”. The waitress didn’t understand it and I saw him pointing to a “hamburger gratiné” (with melted cheese). Another victim of the whole word method.