The BIG GUIDE to teaching LITTLE PEOPLE how to sound out words

Teaching (very) early reading: Part 3

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

My “crackpot” opinion is that our society deprives children of independence, intellectual development, and personal joy, all by refusing to teach them to read until quite late.

In the traditional school system learning to read even simple books independently takes somewhere around 1,000 hours of lessons, a lengthy process stretched out across 3-4 years (under good conditions). It usually begins in Pre-K and arrives at the goal somewhere around 1st to 2nd grade for most kids, although standards and capabilities vary widely, and failures are common (40% proficiency for grade level reading is a “success” in many schools). In light of this, it makes sense that the traditional education system is riven with debates on how best to teach reading. Is it phonics? Whole-word? And so on.

In comparison, children can learn to read by being tutored by a parent for about 15 to 20 minutes a day within a single year (somewhere between 100-200 hours in total, give or take, depending on age). This can be done before kindergarten and it opens up their world (not to mention providing a much-needed alternative to screentime). It’s a result pulled off consistently by people like homeschooling moms, an undeniable case where the “crackpots” and “weirdos” do something objectively ten times faster and easier than the “experts.”

I did this with my own son, who was reading simple stories by age 2. Here’s a progression video for Roman, my now three-year-old toddler, demonstrating a lot of the process I walk through below: first starting with a slower form of “double reading” where he repeats what he initially sounds out, as well as playing complete-the-sentence games for individual words, and by the end he’s reading confidently books with advanced words, like a story about a drake (male ducks—early readers build vocabulary too!) getting caught by a snake. Warning: he likes to snack while reading.

This is Part 3 of a guide for other parents to do this with their kids. Here is Part 1 (why do this) and Part 2 (how to establish a formal time for learning). This one contains the meat of actual phonics practice and is much longer.

Why write a guide? After all, isn’t getting a child reading essentially an educationally-solved activity, at least in theory? Unfortunately, no.

First, there is far less material about getting toddlers and young children to read, rather than older school-age kids with longer attention spans. Second, many of the popular methods that do exist—even those aimed at parents—are not very fun, are overly complicated, often incomplete, and take too long to reach practical real-world reading mastery. Third, they often fail to take advantage of the most potent educational force we know, 1:1 tutoring, and all the flexibility and personalization that it entails.

My method begins with a fun personalized complete-the-sentence game to play that teaches basic phonics, then speedruns the child to advanced books that actually stimulate them.

What makes my method different?

It's designed for parents who want to tutor their young kids to get them reading for entertainment as fast as possible. That entails four properties:

(a) being “for parents” means that it cannot rely on detailed knowledge or teaching resources. Parents are busy.

(b) being “for young kids” means it must be doable for even toddlers, and so must be fun and game-based, taking advantage of the fact that you are your child's best tutor since you know what holds their attention.

(c) “reading for entertainment” means that it must actually work to achieve the goal of a child spending time reading by themselves.

(d) “as fast as possible” means skipping the over-complications of standard methods. E.g., while phonics is by far the best way to start reading, following phonics slavishly (as many do) will substantially delay and overcomplicate the process.

For instance, usually, if you pick up your average “teach your kid to read” book (Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons below is a popular one with over one million sales) it will look like this for the earliest lessons.

source

And listen, you can use these as part of a larger process. But I bought this book and never used it because it violates so many of the above principles. It’s overly-complicated for parents and kids; in fact, I still don’t even know what all of those arrows and dots mean!¹ Just plowing through one-size-fits-all lessons is too boring and difficult for very young children like toddlers to attend to. It’s not interactive, game-based, or targeted. A bunch of hard-coded lessons will rarely result in a very young kid being able to read independently. It's like teaching Calculus with one or two examples per concept and expecting someone who can’t put on their pants to get an A.

Almost everywhere you look, there's all sorts of overcomplicated advice on the subject of teaching kids how to read. Here's from childrenlearningreading.com:

"Onsets" are the beginnings of words, and "rimes" are the ending parts, which follow the "onset". A few examples:

DOG: D-OG (D is the onset and OG is the rime)

CLAP: CL-AP (CL is the onset and AP is the rime)

Such unnecessary rules (ahem, noise) are major steps to many early reading programs. Consider the normally up-front step of learning how to “blend” sounds into words, which is a huge roadblocks for lots of children. In my method you just let them pick blending up naturally as they go, since they can actually start reading just fine without it! You just skip it. My baseline belief is that kids are smart—the best learners in the world, in a way—and so we should leverage that as much as possible (while still using a rigorous framework and progression).

The goal of this guide is to reduce a lot of the frustrations that I had. For example, if you walk into the bookstore and you buy early reading materials, you will get things like Level 1 Reading: Biscuit and the Icy Gale or other stuff that’s comically advanced in terms of phonics. So the guide provides not only a game-based progression for early phonics, but also all the resources that I used, covering which reading materials are actually high-quality, as well as (later on) how to manage your child's growing knowledge structure and get them reading independently. It’s based on the obvious-to-me but somehow rarely-followed belief that learning to read should resemble:

Progressing through sensible tiers of mastery:

Tier 1. Memorizing that every letter has its own basic sound.

Tier 2. Mapping individual sounds into coherent words via a complete-the-sentence game.

Tier 3. Phonically-basic sentences and stories. Initial sight words. Introducing early reading materials that are actually engaging and fun.

Tier 4. The necessity of managing the child’s growing knowledge graph and the (simple) tools you need for that. Introducing the rules of phonics wherein the order of the letters next to one another transform the sounds (like the SH and CH in “fish” and “chips”). Then more advanced rules, like when an E at the end of a word changes the vowel sound (e.g., “sit” vs. “site”), along with more sight words and patterns (“all” as in “tall,” “ball,” etc).

Tier 5. Take-Off, when you transition to just sitting with them helping as they read aloud, all in order to speedrun mastery. Essentially, you build their reading foundation with phonics but eventually begin to favor simply pure reading practice. This is because at a certain point the phonics rules get too complex and specialized so as to be useless vs. just practice.

This installment covers Tiers 1-3, as those are the basic steps to getting a child reading sentences and stories. If you want to get kids started on phonics, what follows below is what I think the best method is. Tiers 4 and 5, which continues all the way to advanced independent reading and the world beyond phonics, will come soon.

What I found is that process of teaching reading is about establishing cognitive training wheels and later discarding them for the real thing once they slow you down. It’s the exact same way kids learn how to ride a bike now-a-days, starting with balance bikes, except instead of the mechanics of wheels and pedals complexifying underneath them as they try and try again, they become little pilots of language itself.

Note: If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. This full guide is turning into a ~15,000 word monograph and it’s paid subscribers who enable ambitious longterm projects like it. If you are already a paid subscriber, know you’re why this exists at all. Even if you don’t use it, others will, so thank you for helping small people buzzing with a new technicolor consciousness expand their horizons.