How I'm teaching our 3 year old to read
And why we didn't wait for school to teach them
Our 5 year old learnt to read when she was 3, and, we’ve commenced the same journey with our youngest, S, now 3. Oz previously wrote a lengthy post about the process for our eldest here. I’ll start this post by discussing the how, and then get to the why.
How
I started teaching S letters when she was around 2, because she was inspired to do so by a Kmart alphabet puzzle that we had lying around. To do so, I just kept the puzzle in our main living space, and then every few days or week or so I’d pull out a new letter and we’d repeat what it was until she remembered them. Then we’d go through them sequentially every now and then to make sure they’d stuck. (This was all just a game, as we all know 2 year olds don’t respond well to drill sessions).
DO NOT TEACH KIDS THE NAMES OF LETTERS! That is dumb! Useless! Who the hell thought it would be helpful for a kid to first learn that an “A” was an “ay” - it is clearly an “a” as in “apple”, and people are wasting kids’ time attempting to teach them anything otherwise. Phonetics is where it is “a”t.
Then when she was a few months off turning 3, I attempted to introduce the book we’d started our eldest with, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. But she only took to it in earnest when she turned 3, and we now spend about 5 (max 10) minutes a day(ish) on it. The alphabet puzzle had taught capital letters, whereas all of the words in this book are lower case. So she needed to learn the letters from scratch, but I believe learning the capitalized versions gave her a good conceptual understanding of the idea that a symbol can represent a sound.
The book doesn’t introduce all of the letters at once. Instead, it introduces a few, then drip-feeds new letters slowly, all the while introducing short words based on all of the letters they’ve been exposed to. I believe that is key - without an application, learning letters would be pretty boring. And, it all starts off phonetic, so the letters and word structures *make sense* (don’t get used to it, kids!).
We’re about 1/3 the way through it, and it really took her no time at all to understand the concept of blending letters to make a word. What we love about this approach is that it’s simple and effective. It lacks the bright colors, stickers, and engaging pictures that other products offer (looking at you, ABC Reading Eggs), which I take to mean that it’s not trying to trick kids into thinking that reading is fun. They actually *find* it fun because they get launched into reading actual, logically-spelt words really quickly, and that kind of rapid feedback is invaluable. Highly, highly recommend giving this book a go.
Why
We’re teaching our youngest to read much earlier than the norm, for the same reasons that we taught our eldest: they want to, we value the self-autonomy that it provides, and they got their second teeth much earlier than most kids do and so naturally were psychologically ready (kidding!). For our youngest, it’s also been important to not feel like she’s missing out on what the rest of the family is doing. Being able to read as she sees the rest of us do has been important to her. And as her parent, I’ve also been conscious of wanting to provide her with the same opportunities as we did for our eldest; if we exposed our eldest to the idea of reading at 3, I wanted to make sure we did for our youngest, too.
This post would be incomplete without this disclaimer, too: we are very big on fostering a love of learning as one of the over-arching goals of our kids’ educational experience. Forcing our agenda on kids is not compatible with this, i.e. this wouldn’t work if they didn’t want to. It’s probably important for some of you to hear that we only teach stuff if the kids actually want to learn it at any given moment. Often they want to play instead, and that’s okay! Unlike a certain school system I know….