I Taught My Pre School Kids to Read!

Both my daughters are now grown women, one with a child of her own. Back when they were small I was a stay at home mom through choice. I felt that the job of bringing up kids was worth doing properly and that I was not the sort of person who could do that and manage full time work outside the home. I know some women do this very well and I have nothing but admiration for them. For me this was not a moral issue at all, but a practical one. I have to say, it wasn't always easy to spend all my days in the company of small children with not much adult conversation, but it was worth it to see them grow and develop without being too stressed out to enjoy it!

I didn't plan to teach my kids to read. I'm not a qualified teacher and so anything you read here is purely from my own experience. I didn't force it upon them either. If either of the girls had given me any reason to think they weren't enjoying it I would have found something else to amuse them. It just seemed to happen as a natural part of the mothering process with us but I'm not sure that all kids are ready for reading at this early age. I don't want to give the impression that I think my kids were special in any way. I just think that some kids, maybe those who have been read to from about a year old and enjoy it, may pick it up earlier than the kids who prefer more hands on physical activities at that age. Sooner or later most kids learn to read. So if anyone who reads this article wants to try it with their kids I think its important to recognize that this isn't some kind of competition. If your kids don't take to it then do something else with them that you both enjoy doing. They will be learning a whole lot of other useful things and reading will come later.

By the time my elder daughter, Joanna, was three I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep her amused. She was always a bright child who showed an absorbing interest in everything around her and she soon grew bored with toys .One of her favorite things from around 18 months old was to be read to.I have some very fond memories of winter afternoons curled up on the settee with her, reading stories.

I used to buy Ladybird books and we joined the local public library. I don't know if Ladybird books are available anywhere other than Britain but they were perfect for preschoolers and very cheap.Many of the Ladybird books simply had a picture of an object on one page with the word printed on the page opposite. They're still in print over here. Joanna particularly liked these books and very quickly seemed to know what was coming next before I turned the page. I then began to notice that if I covered up the picture she would sometimes recognize the word without it. This made me wonder.

One day I announced that we were going to play a new game. We were going to make small cardboard labels cut from an old cereal packet and using a black felt tip pen we would write on them the words of things we were going to label. The first time we made just four labels for things in the living room....rug, door, chair, and cat, I wrote the words in lower case letters, just like Joanna would first encounter letters at school. I let her help with the cutting using her special kids scissors and didn't make too much fuss if the labels were odd shapes!

Then once we had our labels finished we went round the room and placed the labels on the things in question after looking at the word very carefully, sounding it out and trying to remember it.

Next I asked Joanna to collect all the labels up again, put them in a hat and shake them up.

Now came the hard bit. She had to pick out the labels one at a time and go and put each of them in turn on the correct object. We practiced with these labels until she got them all right several times. I was surprised how quickly she picked it up. I gave her lots of encouragement and there was a mystery treat at the end - we had a 'winter picnic' of raisins, oranges,apples and chocolate milk on a cloth spread on the floor and she invited her teddies along! It was good fun!

Over the next couple of weeks we gradually added more labels day by day and roamed around the whole house. I let Joanna decide what she wanted to label and pretty soon we had around fifty labels which she could place accurately. We had a lot of picnics that winter!

It was around this time that I managed to get Joanna a part time place afternoon at our local nursery school. She absolutely loved going there. One afternoon when I went to collect her, the nursery teacher took me to one side and said "Did you know that Joanna can read?" I told her that she could read some words and was learning fast. "No", she said, "I don't mean just the odd word. This afternoon I found her in the library corner reading a story book to some of the other children. She wasn't pretending to read it; she was actually reading it fluently!"

I was amazed at this. I hadn't realized how much she had picked up just by playing our game and having me read to her regularly. In the end, Joanna turned out to be a particularly intelligent child, so I thought maybe this was why she'd picked up reading so quickly.

My second daughter, Kate, was born when Joanna was eight years old. She too had a love of story books so when she was three I decided to try to teach her to read in the same way. I was more than pleased to discover that she also picked it up using the same method, although it took her a little longer before she was able to read a book by herself. Nonetheless, she did this well before starting school.

I was lucky in a way that there was such a big gap in age between the girls. It meant that I was able to give each of them my undivided attention when small, since Joanna was out at school when I was teaching Kate to read. It may not have been so easy if I had two preschoolers in the house at the same time!