Getting your child to love reading in 2024
Getting your child to love reading in 2024
Teaching (very) early reading: Part 2
This spring I introduced a long-term project of mine: a guide for teaching very young children to read. It’s based on my own experience teaching my two-year-old (who is now three). You can see our progress here:
While it certainly doesn’t make sense for everyone to do this, there are many reasons to teach a toddler to read early, from ensuring their first formal learning experience is a positive one, to sheer parental enjoyment, to worries over more standard education pipelines, to potential developmental benefits, all outlined in Part 1. This is Part 2.
Why create a guide? After all, there are plenty other popular methods out there, including bestselling books like Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. However, even for those described as “easy,” my opinion was: holy crap, they made teaching reading complicated! And such formal resources can run into trouble. Too often they are essentially written-down lectures, and therefore one-size-fits-all, inflexible, and easily exhausted (toddlers have prodigious memories and can retain entire rote lessons without true understanding).
As I’ve written about previously in “Why we stopped making Einsteins,” elite education used to be very different than our lecture-based system. Many famous names were instead taught via what I dubbed “aristocratic tutoring,” people like John von Neumann, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, Ada Lovelace, or Charles Darwin. In fact, universities like Cambridge used to run almost entirely on tutoring, not lectures. Probably because they knew what scientific research has shown: that one-on-one tutoring is the most effective method of education. I can see this historical change in education clearly even in how the initial steps of reading are taught: too often, the modern lecture-based education system spills into teaching outside of school. Therefore other popular methods often still mimic classrooms, failing to take advantage of the flexibilities and benefits of one-on-one tutoring.
In comparison, this guide emphasizes the feedback between teacher and student.
It is designed for very early reading (but can be done at any age).
It provides easy-to-follow recipes for lessons, not just an inflexible set of exercises that may not work for your kid.
I eschew steps other methods spend a lot of time on, but that just confuse the child.
The learning curve is not steep on the parent’s side, which matters greatly for time purposes.
It speedruns to mastery of simple sentences and therefore grants confidence, enjoyment, and usefulness to the child fast.
It provides Q&As on troubleshooting (plus you can ask me in the comments), as well as links to all the low-cost supplies I used.
Since it occasionally discusses my own child as an example, the guide is for paid subscribers only. So if you want to either teach reading yourself, just curiously follow along, or simply support this sort of independent research and writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber ($7 a month) to The Intrinsic Perspective.
The guide is written from the viewpoint of a parent teaching a toddler, although most of its lessons can be applied at any age with minimal adaptation (and by non-parents, of course). Perhaps most importantly, it is grounded in what I think the basis of all learning is: loving and grokking.