Teaching a toddler to 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.