Teaching young children to read begins with a robust library, frequent read alouds, and exposure to a large and comprehensive vocabulary through the written word and oral speech. Phonics alone will not result in a child becoming a proficient reader. Children need to understand what they are reading and make connections from one book to the next. Therefore, the more exposure to a vast vocabulary, the meaning of the words they hear and see in books, and background knowledge derived from good books, the better prepared they will be to read increasingly more difficult stories, poems, nonfiction works, and so forth. With that said, phonics is an important component of learning how to read, and this series—Teaching Young Children to Read—lays out how a parent might teach letters and letter sounds to their young child with the end result of the child reading independently.
I set out to teach my daughter to read at age three (she was actually three months shy of turning three when we began the process) because I wanted her to choose reading as a form of entertainment (i.e., read for pleasure), and I wanted her to read to learn as soon as possible. I undertook this endeavor using the method that Erik Hoel employed with his son, but I quickly learned that not everything that worked for Hoel’s son would work for my daughter. When the learning process wasn’t going as planned, following Hoel’s method, I looked to the Montessori method of teaching reading to get some new tricks. This post is a description of how I introduced learning to read and subsequent posts will describe the process that ultimately worked for my daughter—and me—including, how I would change my method if I were to do it all over again (which I will with my son!).
Keep in mind: my daughter was two when we started. What works for toddlers and early-pre-school-age children likely won’t work well for older children learning how to read.