Teaching a toddler to read
- Joanne Jacobs
- Sep 7
- 2 min read
Erik Hoel explains how he taught his toddler son to read in 20 minutes a day, starting when he was two-and-a-half. The boy tested at the third-grade level in reading at the age of three-and-a-half years old, and could read the opening of The Hobbit. Now four, he "reads for pleasure daily, including early chapter books, or nonfiction books (ones about whales are favorites)."
Hoel wrote a guide for parents on how he did it, starting with phonics and moving through phonics-based early readers, such as Julia Donaldson's Songbirds Phonics series.
"Teaching him to read was a lot of fun for both of us" writes Hoel. "Many of the books we used for practice became dear to him, like the Frog and Toad series." He can entertain himself with a book -- not a device.
As a neuroscientist, he writes, "I can say that claims of some special 'reading window' years after spoken language acquisition aren’t scientifically supported." There's no early reading is only for "super-geniuses." With a parent tutor, it's achievable for many young children.
One-on-one tutoring is the most effective method of education, he concludes. It "gives kids more time to be kids." They can go outside and play.
I'm going to guess that Hoel has passed on some good genes to his son. What works for a bright child in a highly enriched environment may not work for everyone.
My daughter, who was very slow on crawling and walking, knew the alphabet at 21 months, phonics at 24 months and how to put letters together to make words at 27 months. She was reading well by the age of three. She had lots of people reading to her, but only five minutes of instruction to get from m-a-t to "mat" and so on.
She's very, very good at pattern recognition, but her IQ tested as nothing special when she was three. (She was part of a follow-up study on kids who'd been through Neonatal Intensive Care, so perhaps they were just looking for signs of brain damage.) Anyhow, she ended up as a literary agent.
Now her daughter is 21 months old. If she wakes up in her crib, she reaches up to the shelf and gets a book to look at.
There are enough kids, likely among the most advantaged and cognitively capable, who learn to read with minimal or no instruction to facilitate “educators” disdain for formal instruction. Most kids need such instruction.
My two children both read before they started preschool; since they were of the generation to get Gameboys and such, eventually, I was always happy, in retrospect, that they learned to read young and loved to read (from then on).
I didn't have set lessons for them, but took the opportunity, when holding them and looking at a book together (the "board books" when they were really little), to point out the letters (referred to by their sound , not their "name" !) in the same way I pointed out a dog or the color orange or what-have-you. They don't need to learn the letters 'in order,' and they don't need to learn 'the alphabet song' (although they might lik…
My parents' two children were both reading at about the same age: simple dog/cat/hat/mat at 2.5, books with sentences at 3.5. My brother freaked out the babysitter when he was 3 by reading aloud the note my mother had left for her.
I don't recall the exact method, but I do know that there were lots of children's books in the house, and one of my earliest favorites was Dr. Seuss's A-B-Cs.