How to Tell if Your Child is Ready to Learn to Read

Print our quick test for free!

Download and print the dogfish test for free!

Some people think that if your kid can learn letter sounds (like a says “aa”, m says “mmmm”) they’re ready to learn to read but that’s not true. There’s a separate developmental milestone required, which is the ability to blend sounds together.

So a lot of parents don’t understand this. At first, they get an initial rush of excitement when they see their toddler learning letter sounds earlier than they thought possible.

But when it comes time to blend those sounds into words, the child struggles and the parents wonder what happened. But nothing went wrong. Their child just needs a little more time before getting started.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to know when a child is ready to blend sounds. So instead, check to see if they’re able to understand the concept of left-to-right reading order, which is a developmental milestone that occurs around the same time!

Print out a sheet of emojis like the one you see here, and show your child: “This is dogfish! And this is fishdog!”

Then ask them if they can find dogfish, fishdog, car plane, plane car

If they can’t understand the difference between dogfish and fishdog, they definitely won’t be able to understand the difference between “am” and “ma”.

Now if you want one of these emoji sheets, you can of course make it yourself, but we have a free one that you can download and print to save yourself some time. It’s the last page in Mentava’s alphabet sounds book, which you can download for free right here.

The book is great because it doesn’t just include 26 letters, it teaches the 44 sounds of the English language, like oi, oo, voiced th, unvoiced th, and so on. We’ll send you a free digital copy when you join our mailing list.

Buy a hardcover as cheap as possible

Many, many people asked us how to buy a printed version, and we’re delighted to inform you that the full-color, 149-page, hardcover version of Mentava’s Alphabet Sounds is now available and became the #1 new Children’s Reading Book on Amazon!

The books are about $30, which is as cheap as Amazon will let us sell them. We make no profit on these books, we just want to make them as accessible as possible.

  • Hear it directly from parents:

    “I’m so excited for this book! This book is exactly what I’ve been looking for, it’s going to make teaching my son to read so much easier, starting him off without all the confusion I had to struggle through as a kid and without having to do extra work to fill in the missing pieces other ABC books leave out. Very unique and helpful how the difficult sound concepts are broken up into easy bite size pieces. The pictures are engaging and colorful without being overwhelming. My son can flip to any page and learn at his own pace without having to follow a rigid progression.”