Teaching young children to read
Start by building their library, reading aloud to them, and exposing them to lots and lots of words
“We start reading too late,” claims Erik Hoel. Although (most) children are capable of learning to read as early as age two, a process that can begin when they start speaking, we wait until they enter kindergarten at age five or six to begin teaching children to read. Hoel, knowing that we need not wait until age five, decided to teach his child to read starting at age two. I, too, know it’s possible to teach young children to read. Once upon a time, I worked at a preschool where many kids could sit down and read me a book, instead of the other way around, at ages three and four. They had been exposed to literacy activities early and thus were prepared to read early. Admittedly, this preschool served mostly children of college professors, and most of them were only allowed to watch 30 minutes to an hour or TV a day, if any, but working with them showed that kids can be taught to read before entering kindergarten if the time was taken to teach them.
Hoel wrote a five-part series walking readers through the steps he took to teach his son to read, along with the data that motivated his decision to teach early reading and his personal reasons for doing so. I had already planned to begin teaching my daughter to read, starting a few months before her third birthday, when I came across Hoel’s article titled, “I Taught My Three Year Old How to Read ‘The Hobbit’.” I enthusiastically read through his process and used his guide to begin teaching my own daughter to read. Like Hoel, a major motivating force for why I am teaching reading early is because I want my daughter, who I will call VV, to read for entertainment, when we are at home and when we are out at places that require waiting, such as the doctor’s office or when she’s at her dada’s shop waiting for him to finish work. I also want her to transition from learning to read to reading to learn as early as possible.
Some of Hoel’s guidance worked for my daughter and some of it didn’t. In this and subsequent posts I will describe our process, including where Hoel’s method worked and where I had to choose a different path to teach reading. VV is nearly three and a half and not yet a proficient reader, but she is well on her way. In this post, before diving into how we taught letter sounds and names and the other mechanics of learning to read, I want to share what our home environment looks like in regards to books and literacy and what I think are the prerequisites to the sit-down work of learning to read.
Books, books, and more books
I love to read, and I love books. I may (just maybe) love books too much. We recently moved, and, over a month later, I am still unpacking books. In my defense, much of them are work-related, but one thing that moving does is illuminate what you have too much of—for me, that’s books. Because I love books so much, and have many favorites, my daughter had a sizable collection before she was even born, and it grew rapidly after her arrival. I was an elementary school teacher for a few years, and so she inherited that library, along with books from my childhood. And then I and my many family members who also love to read contributed to her shelves. Now, VV has reached the age where she is picking out her own books, growing her library even more.
All of this to say, VV is surrounded by books to the point where she can’t help but find ones that she loves to read—over and over again. Becoming acquainted with books—holding them in her hands, looking through the pages at the colorful illustrations—is the first step to developing a love for the written word. And a love for the written word is the first step to becoming a proficient reader, a step that cannot be skipped. If a child does not love books and cherish their ability to read, they won’t read often enough to become good at it and will never be great at it. Thus, even if a parent does not love books like I do, they must stock their child’s library to nurture a love of reading. The books can either come from the store or from the library, but, either way, a child should always have options to choose from.
Read alouds
A child’s library is where they can go to grab a book to look at on their own, and it’s where they go to choose the books they want their parents or caregivers to read to them. Read alouds can happen at any point in the day, but the most common reading time is right before bed, as part of a child’s nightly bedtime routine. My husband and I have read to VV nearly every night since she was born. I even read to her in the middle of the night when she was an infant waking for her nightly feedings. Part of the reason VV loves books is because she’s been read to all of her life; therefore, she has discovered great stories that she looks forward to hearing and knows that there are more great stories to discover in other books as well. If for some reason we don’t read at night—because we got home late from an outing or we stayed up late to watch a movie—VV can count on being read to at other times of the day.
Another benefit of read alouds is that they help develop a child’s attention span. When parents first begin reading aloud to their children, short books with engaging illustrations and interactive elements, such as touch and feel or pop-up books, are best. They allow children to experience a book—i.e., understand how you open it, learn that they have different pages, and discover that there are interesting things happening inside books on each page—within the bounds of their short attention span. Then, as a young child gets used to how books work and being read to, they will be able to sit for longer books that tell stories.
Finally, read alouds help children to make sense of the world and tell their own stories. VV includes elements of the stories we’ve read into her imaginative play. Sometimes she reads her books to us, using the illustrations as her guide, or to her baby dolls. And sometimes she uses the vocabulary she has gained from reading to tell her own stories. This behavior is why I ensure that the stories are good, as in worth embodying and retelling.
I will continue read alouds in some shape or form even after VV is reading on her own. I view them as a valuable family activity that can’t be replaced. But, I won’t read to her whenever she brings me a book—and I have time to read it—after she has learned to read on her own. For the goal of reading for entertainment to be realized, I want her to rely on her abilities to read rather than mine. I once heard a story about a father who would stop reading a story to his children right as the most exciting part began because he knew they would feel tortured having to wait to hear how the story turned out and would be motivated to learn to read on their own. When I heard this I smiled and thought: Oh, dads. What a brilliant idea.
Words, words, and more word—plus, their meaning
Access to a wide range of books and being read to often both help children to develop a love of books and reading, which then develops the internal drive to read by themselves. But, when it comes to ensuring children become proficient readers, the words that children experience through not only books but oral language and their every-day lives matters a lot. Seeing many different words all around them will help children understand the mechanics of words—i.e., how they sound and how they are spelled—and what they mean. Knowing what words mean moves children beyond seeing symbols on a page that have sounds associated with them to comprehending what they read, as well as increasing their store of knowledge.
Once upon a time, I was of the opinion that children could not perform well on reading comprehension exams if they had not experienced what they were reading about in the material world. I thought: if a child has never been to the ocean or a lake, how could they possibly understand it? I now know that this opinion is nonsense. If children read stories that describe lakes or informational texts about lakes then of course they can come to know what a lake is like. Knowledge acquisition does not only come in the form of hands-on learning. Experience certainly helps children deepen what they know by encountering something first hand and applying what they’ve learned, the knowledge they’ve acquired, but experience is not a prerequisite for comprehension—access to words and a body of knowledge is.
Thus, to ensure that children become proficient readers with the ability to acquire knowledge, adults need to expose them to as many words as possible, helping children to develop an expansive vocabulary through the written word and oral language. They should read books aloud, but also talk to children about what things are called, how things work, and what is happening in a given situation. VV is in the “why?” stage to the point where asking the question is reflexive. Being asked why from sun up to sun down can get frustrating, especially when she unthinkingly asks why when she knows the answer, but giving explanations for whatever she is experiencing helps her to build vocabulary and understand different things, places, and experiences. I also talk to her throughout the day about what I’m doing and what we’re seeing. This vocabulary will be a benefit to her when she begins reading for pleasure and, even more so, when she begins reading to learn.
Another means for parents to help increase their child’s vocabulary is to place word cards on objects around the house and point to and talk about the words they see in the world, such as on food packaging, restaurant menus, billboards, buses, semi trucks, and so forth.
From prepping the environment to learning to read
Once the home environment is set up to encourage reading and to nurture a love of the written word, the hands-on process of learning how to read can begin. In subsequent posts, under the theme of “teaching reading early” I will share how I went about teaching VV how to read, along with some book ideas for different purposes and stages of reading.