How To Teach Your Preschooler To Read

When our first child was born, I looked around the house dismayed that every inch of floor space was either stained concrete or tile.  I could envision nothing but bumps, bruises and goose eggs as he transitioned from crawler to walker to full-out running toddler.  So, I bought a set of 6 interlocking foam mats that covered about a 4' x 6' area in our living room for over $50...fine for an infant who wasn't walking yet, but it was apparent they wouldn't contain him for long.

Driving past a yard sale one day, I spied a humongous pile of foam mats.  Sure that they would be expensive, I stopped anyway and inquired about the price...$20.  $20 for what looked like at least 20 mats, a little dirty but in good condition otherwise.  SOLD!  I paid the woman, took my mats home and cleaned them up. 60 mats in total, enough to cover the entire living room and most of the main hallway in the house.  Awesome!

We still had the problem of what to do about the playroom.  Looking for something else completely on craigslist, I came across a woman who was selling 5 complete sets of 3/4 inch thick interlocking alphabet, number and shape mats for $80.  I snatched those up with a quickness.  They covered the floor completely in the 11' x 12' room that was the playroom.  Excuse the construction.  We were in the middle of replacing the baseboards.

So what does this have to do with teaching your preschooler to read, you're probably wondering right about now?

Hayden learned to crawl in that room on those mats.  We spent countless hours playing in there when he was a baby.  My husband and I would point to a letter or number and tell him what it was.  He wasn't talking yet, so he'd just look at us, smile and laugh...so happy with his new found independence.  After a few months or two, we started asking him to find letters and numbers for US.  He'd crawl over and point one out, and then because we had more than one set, he'd crawl to the other one and point to it.

Hayden started walking around a 13 months.  This new skill opened up all sorts of avenues for him...literally.  We still worked on letters and numbers every week but he had more important things to do than to show us where 'Z' was.

Around 18 months, I was very pregnant with our second child (read: big as a house), and tired all the time.  Poor Hayden was desperate for me to get down on the floor and play with him like I used to, so I came up with an alternative.  I started teaching him the sounds each of the letters make.  We'd focus on 5 or 6 a day reviewing them along the way.  Occasionally we'd use our LeapFrog Fridge Magnets to make it a little more fun.  We talked about the letter sounds wherever we went...in the car, at the grocery store, out for a walk, etc.

Then, Sophie was born, and I spent most of the time we had together trying to get him used to this new little person monopolizing Mommy's time...something he did not appreciate one bit.  We picked it back up after a few months though, and by 26 months, he had mastered his letter sounds.  So while Sophie was having her tummy time, I introduced a new game to Hayden.  I would point out an object in the room, have him tell me what it was called, and then ask him if he could tell me the beginning sound of the word.  "What sound does 'window' start with?"  "How about 'fan'?"  He picked up on this really fast and was soon asking me if random words started with a certain sound...and was most often right.

By 30 months, he was getting bored with this game and was ready to learn something new, so I purchased the first set in a series of phonics readers called Bob Books and started helping him to sound out the words.  We'd read one together each night before the rest of our bedtime books.  Here's a sample page from Set 1, Book 1.  Page one was simply "Mat."

Things were going well, but as we made it through more and more sets, and the difficulty level was increasing, I started to worry that I wasn't teaching him all of the things he needed to know.  I researched various reading programs and settled on The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading by Jessie Wise.  I don't use it as curriculum right now (though I could), but I do use it as a guide to know what to introduce next, making sure nothing is missed.  It's a very organized, thorough and systematic phonics program that takes you all the way from single letter sounds through completely independent reading.  It doesn't have any bells and whistles.  The pages are black and white and there are no illustrations, but you don't need any of that, especially if you use it as a teaching guide like I do rather than a workbook.


Each time I introduce a new sound, I write the letter combo on our little black board along with several words that utilize that combo.  We sound the first couple out together and then I have him sound out the rest on his own.  Then, I write out 2 or 3 sentences using the same words and have him read them to me. That's it...nothing fancy.  The rest comes from practice reading actual books.

We have story time in the morning, and no matter what the book of the day is, I have Hayden read the words I know he can read, and I read the rest.  Then, at night he reads one of the Bob Books to us as part of his bedtime routine.

As you know, each child is different and will go at their own pace.  Hayden turned 4 in June and can read books in the 4th set of the Bob Books on his own as well as sound out/spell consonant-vowel-consonant words.  Sophie, on the other hand, is 29 months and thinks every letters says "guh"...and that's OK with me.  She'll get there too eventually.

The point of all of this is that teaching your child to read, whether it's a toddler, a preschooler, or an older child, doesn't have to be a big production.  We didn't stress over any part of this process.  He would go through phases where he just wasn't interested in learning anything new or reading to us. When that happened, we just backed off for a while and took our cues from him.

You don't need a bunch of fancy worksheets, learning toys, videos or curriculum to get the job done.  Just some one on one time, a lot of praise, patience and a good selection of phonics readers.  

Have fun, and best of luck!