Helping your child learn to read

Reading to your baby/toddler | Pre-reading skills | Sounds and letters | Starting school

Be warned: learning to read, like learning to walk or talk, seems to make parents tense, anxious and determined to compare their little progeny favourably with yours. So, first (as a little preliminary tension-deflater), there are some key facts you should know from the off...

• There's learning to love books and there's learning to read books. If you can get the first one sorted, the second will follow much more easily.
• There are many different methods for teaching a child to read – and just as many controversies over which method is best.
• Reading readiness varies enormously from child to child. Some children can read fluently before they even start school; others take much longer. But, by and large, they all get there in the end and, a couple of years down the line, you'd be hard pressed to tell which children in any group were the early readers.
• Content is everything. Many a child is put off reading by content that is boring or inappropriate.

Laying the foundation: reading to your baby/toddler

If you have been sharing books with your child from babyhood, she will already know that the same pictures or sounds can be visited again and again within a book. She will also know that it feels good to sit in a loving embrace and to have the enjoyment doubled by sharing a book. For her, looking at books is never a chore or a forced activity. This child has a head start.

You don't need to stick to the text (such as it is) when you're reading books with your baby (which is just as well or you'd both die of boredom). Feel free to go 'off piste' and warble on about the pictures you're looking at ("Look at that cat! Big, black cat! Just like Granny's cat. Big, furry, cuddly cat.") At this stage, it's all about the sing-song sound of your voice and the connection between books and pictures and sounds and fun.

Make sure at least some of your baby books are accessible, preferably in a toybox with other sources of fun, so your child can look at (and suck and chew) them whenever the whim strikes. Chew-friendly cloth books are the best bet here – look for ones with different textures to touch, feel and crackle or squeakers to press and shiny 'mirrors to stare in and giggle at.

As your child gets older and her understanding grows, you can move on to slightly more complicated picture books, with a tad more text to read (hurrah!) and even the outline of a little story. Look for simple, colourful illustrations and toddler-friendly subjects – mainly animals, vehicles, animals doing toddler-type stuff, vehicles doing toddler-type stuff and, of course, toddlers doing toddler-type stuff!

"Before you even think of buying or borrowing a new book for your toddler, you need to repetition-proof it very, very carefully. This is the age of 'Again, again!' If the book's a hit, you will be reading it over and over and over and, exhaustingly, over." Porpoise

Oh, and intricately designed pop-up books are all very lovely but they will stay rip-free and sticky-fingerprint-less for about ten nanoseconds; wipe-clean board books really are the way to go for now.

Moving on: pre-reading skills for a preschooler

Don't be tempted to get the flashcards out. However keen your child is on books, however keen you are to get your child reading for herself (and there really is no rush, remember), there are some 'pre-reading skills' your child really needs to grasp first. 

By now, she should have 'got' that books have a front and a back, and that a book progresses page by page. Next on the agenda is understanding that words on the page are read from left to right, and that the different shapes of the letters inside these words are what helps you figure out what to say as you read the book aloud to her.

Of course, you don't actually need to teach her this; she'll just absorb it if you...

"... keep sharing books with her. Point to the words as you read them, moving your finger along the line. Look at the pictures and try to work out what the story may be about. And during or after reading, talk about what the story was about, what she liked and didn't like and so on. These are all very important pre reading skills." Hulababy

Look for books with bright, funny illustrations and clear, uncomplicated text. Stories with strong rhymes are especially good: they help your child absorb the rhythm and structure of sentences and sharpen up the listening skills she'll soon need to pick up on different initial letter sounds. Rhymes also encourage anticipation – a key pre-reading skill; try stopping before you finish the rhyme to see if she can fill it in for you ("Rain, rain, go away. Come again another ??").

Sounds and letters

If you feel your child is ready, you could also start talking to her about the letter sounds – building on what she's probably already starting to learn at preschool. Find a nice ABC book and look at some of the letters together. Start with the letter her name begins with, and take it from there – let your child dictate the pace you go at (or not!).

And pronounce them phonetically: "a" rather than "ay" and "buh" rather than "bee", as this is the way she will learn them at preschool and school (if you're not sure how to pronounce them, download the DFES guide to Letters and Sounds).

"You could also try putting magnetic letters on the fridge door or buying foam letters to float about in the bath." NorksBride

Once she knows some letter sounds well, you can 'spot' the letters when you see them on street signs and food labels, as well as in books ("Look, yuh for yoghurt.") You could also think up some other letter-sound games to play together, from good old I Spy to more modern, splashy stuff...

"We 'fish' those foam letters with a small net out of the bath: it's a great game. I put about ten letters in, and say, 'Where is m?' and DS1 fishes it out. We also play I Spy and this game where I say, 'This word starts with the 'a', and it's a fruit, it's red and crunchy' and he has to guess what it is. I don't really want him to read before he starts school, but I would like him to 'want' to learn to read and have an interest in letters and sounds and numbers." BlueberryPancake

If your child's still keen for more (and, again, there's no rush), you could find some simple letter-sound colouring/puzzle sheets online...

"Have a look at some of the printable resources on sparklebox.co.uk" Hulababy

... or have a go at helping her blend letter sounds together to make a simple vowel-consonant word: so, "a" and "t" makes "at" or "o" and "n" makes "on". 

"Say 'a' and 't', then say it again, faster and faster, until the sounds run together and the penny, in theory, drops." Porpoise

Starting school: pleasure not pain

Once your child starts school, she will be taught not only the basic letter sounds (each one usually with its own rather snigger-worthy accompanying action) but also the more complicated ones, such as "sh" and "ch" and "ai" and "oi". She'll bring (sometimes crashingly boring) reading books home, along with, at some point, a set of "key words" to learn by heart.

She may take to this all like a duck to water or she may need stacks and stacks of your help and encouragement not to lose heart. It can be hard for those who see their (often months older) classmates outstrip them fast – especially if there are a few who have come into school already able to read.

"My son's a summer-born and was only just four when he started school. He was definitely slower than most of the others at 'getting' the whole idea of reading. I started to think he was destined to be bottom of the pile for ever – it was quite hard not to get a bit worried about it." JuliaB

The key thing to holding your nerve here (and therefore helping your child hold hers, too) is remembering that no two children learn to read at the same speed and pace. Some zoom off from (literally) the word go and then slow down; some plod along gradually; some stutter at first and then speed up – with all sorts of variations in between. And, whatever Smug Mum of Speedy-From-The-Off Reader may imply, there's no great connection between speed of learning to read and speed of brain cells in general.

"As a teacher, I can say neither early reading nor late reading has a bearing on the general intelligence of a child." Hulababy

"Two years on, he's flying through books and, looking at his class as a whole now, you really wouldn't know who was an early reader and who struggled." JuliaB

That said, there are, of course, loads of things you can do to help nudge your little bookworm-to-be onto a slighter faster learning-to-read track...

• Learn what she's learning. Many teachers do a little talk (or write a letter) to explain to parents the method(s) they're using to teach children to read. (If your child's teacher doesn't do this, ask her for some pointers.) The favoured method du jour is (some form of) Phonics – decoding words by sounding out all the different letter sounds they contain. Try to bear this in mind when listening to your child read at home: if she gets stuck on the word "dog", for example, it's probably more helpful to say, "Let's sound it out: d-o-g" than "It begins with d and sounds like frog".
• Look at the cover first. Because, odds on, it'll have a picture on it that sets the scene ("Oh, it's a book about a dog"). And, more than likely, the title will contain the most difficult word in the book ("This book's called My Dog Wellington"). Prepped with that information, anyone would find the book easier to read.
• Give her time to look at the pictures. Ever since she was a baby, your child has known that there are clues to the story in the pictures. So, let her have a good old look at them before she tackles the words for herself.
• Talk about the 'plot. (Such as it is.) Check she's understanding what she's reading, rather than parrotting off the sounds she can decode. Ask her what she thinks might happen next and, at the end, if she liked it or not – and why.
• Don't diss a good guess. Say the sentence is "I have a flannel to wash my face". And your child reads, "I have a flannel to clean my face". That may be wrong but it's a good guess because your child is clearly thinking about the meaning of the sentence. (And you can just gently say, "Nearly. But does clean begin with 'w'?) A child who guesses "I have a flannel to watch my face" may have followed the letter-sound clues slightly better but he's not thinking about the meaning at all.
• Time it right. Keep the reading sessions short (ten minutes at most) and don't even think about starting one if she's hungry, tired or upset.

• Help her learn her key words. Some words, like "he", "she" and "what", just don't decode well with Phonics. But they're so common, they just need to be learnt by heart.

"We've been sent home printed sheets of 15 key words, in boxes, for us to cut up. The idea is to play Snap, stick them on doors, play pairs, anything. When your child knows the first 15, you start again with the next lot." tigi

• Make it fun. School reading books are usually a weird old mixture of really good, new, Phonics-based texts and rather dire, old, death-by-repetition ones. If your child has the misfortune to keep bringing home books of the "The hat is red. The hat is green. The hat is yellow" variety, you may want to search out some less dull alternatives to keep at home.

"The Jelly and Bean books are good: fun and straightforward." frogs

• Keep reading to her. And choose books about things that'll really catch her interest or make her laugh. Get right away from those ploddy reading primers into riddles and rhymes, rude poems and silly plots. Read her ripping yarns, fevered fantasies and fluffy fairy tales. Fill her imagination with the sort of wonderful stuff that keeps reinforcing the link between reading and pleasure. Every child deserves to discover that there's a whole world of bookish pleasures out there; all you have to do as a parent is open the gateway to let her through.