When Do Kids Start Reading? - Book Riot

Making Meaning For Pre-Readers

Can toddlers read? Well, yes. Ages 2–4 are very low stakes times in a child’s reading life, and an excellent time to make reading an enjoyable part of daily life. When sharing stories with young children (might I suggest board books?), you can help them make meaning by discussing the illustrations.

Asking questions aloud and answering them for yourself (“Where did the kid go? Oh! They’re behind the tree!”) can help your child understand what is happening in the story. This also teaches them to evaluate a story as it’s being told. Predictions, character identification, and story part recall are a huge part of early elementary literacy. Practicing these skills as a young child can go a long way. This is also a great place to plug in social emotional education. Point out characters with sad and happy faces and connect the emotion to story events. Even one small comment each time you read a story adds to the richness of your child’s reading life, and very soon you’ll see them copying these habits while they look at books.

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The Mechanics of it All

This is where things get real in the reading world, and often where struggles can pop up. Being able to read is a combination of knowing how to use phonics to decode certain words (cat being the sounds /c//a//t/) and having sight words (“the” doesn’t follow sound rules) memorized. A phonics-based approach to reading will have students learning sounds, then putting the sounds into words, then putting the words into sentences. I’ve written before sharing tips to help beginning readers.

The tricky thing about this part of a reading journey is that people spend years going to school to understand the process of phonics education. Simply being able to read is not enough to know which words a beginning reader will be able to sound out, which words have phonics components they haven’t learned yet, and which words simply don’t follow phonics rules at all. To add to the confusion, some readers are able to decode (unlock words) very quickly without relying too much on phonics rules and others heavily rely on phonics instruction to make reading work. It’s different for every reader and far from simple. I again refer to Reading Rockets: it is generally an awesome resource for caregivers and educators, but also has information about why kids struggle and ideas for helping readers at different stages in this process.

Becoming Fluent

Reading fluently is the next step in the reading journey. Fluency measures speed, accuracy, and expression. A huge component of building fluency is repeated readings: having beginning readers read the same thing over and over, building confidence and becoming familiar with the text. Speed and accuracy will improve as the student feels confident in the actual words. Expression comes as the student understands what is happening in the text.