Is your child ready to learn to read?

Knowing letters doesn't mean reading readiness

Children can learn letter–sound pairings at a surprisingly young age. “This animal says moo” is not THAT different from “this letter says mmm.” But the ability to blend individual letter sounds into words often doesn’t develop for another year.

That gap can be puzzling: a young child may know every sound in a word and still be unable to read it. This is a normal stage of development!

Use letter sounds, not letter names

A common early literacy mistake is teaching kids letter names. Instead of using letter names, call letters by the sound they make.

The word “cat” isn't pronounced “seeayytee”. Letter names are useless for learning to read.

Many letter names are worse than useless, they're actively confusing. For young kids learning both letter names and letter sounds at the same time, it can be hard to remember whether “r” makes the sound “arr” or “rrr”. A common mistake would be sounding out “rat” as “arrrat”.

Reading requires direction and order

Our brains are rotation-invariant by default. If a dog runs past us to the right, and then turns around and runs back to the left, it’s still a dog. That’s not the case in reading.

To tell the difference between “b” and “d”, or “am” and “ma”, kids need to understand that direction matters. Researchers have run this experiment using transposed-letter pairs, but we’ve found that emojis are simpler.

🐶🐟 dogfish🐟🐶 fishdog

The phonics journey

Most phonics curricula are roughly the same: learn letter-sound pairs, then learn to blend them together. For simpler written languages like Spanish, that’s all you need!

But English has 44 sounds, most of which are spelled with more than one letter. So then you need to learn things like digraphs (sh, ch, th), vowel teams (oi, oo, ea), silent e (kite, ride), and so on.

Focusing first on a strong phonics foundation makes it much easier to learn irregular words like “said” or “you”. English spelling is messy, but it’s not completely random. It’s not like “you” is spelled “gkwt”. Your brain remembers words much more efficiently when it has mastered the underlying phonetic system.

The role you want to play

Some parents enjoy being their child’s academic teacher, getting into the weeds of the curriculum and being personally responsible for their child’s engagement and motivation. Other parents feel like their shared time improves when they can focus on supporting and encouraging their kid, rather than playing the role of a taskmaster.