Helping Your Child Read Simple Words

First Steps

It’s a memorable moment when your child takes their first steps as a toddler. Maybe they’ve been cruising along the furniture for a while, but taking those first, shaky steps out into the world is a cause for celebration! It is much the same with first steps in reading! 

A Strong Foundation

Children build their reading foundation muscles by learning the sounds that letters make. Let’s take the simple word “at.” First, we need to know that the letter a makes /a/ like “apple” and the letter t makes /t/ like “top.” 

Reviewing letter sounds with your child to make sure they know the sounds each letter makes helps them to build a strong foundation to move forward!

Ready to go

Once we know our letter sounds, we can feel confident taking our first steps by putting sounds together to make words! Start with simple, 3-letter words that have a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern. Just like we wouldn’t expect a child to go straight from crawling to running, we don’t expect a child to go from letter sounds to reading books just yet!

Here are some strategies to get them started:

Tip: When teaching your child a new skill, it can be helpful to use an “I do, We do, You do” approach. This means you first show your child how to do something (I do), then do it with them (We do), and finally ask them to try it on their own (You do).

• Show your child a CVC word, such as “cat.” 

• Using letter tiles/magnets/blocks makes this fun, but writing on a white board or paper is great too! 

• Ask the child to help you say the sound for each letter (not the letter name) “/c/ /a/ /t/”

• Pointing to each letter as you say the sound really helps!

• Show how you can blend these sounds together to make a word - “/c/ /a/ /t/… cat!”

• Get excited about how you figured that out together and ask the child to try the next one!

• Change just one letter for the next words and try again!

• For example, cat → bat → bad → sad → sat → hat… and so on.

• Praise your child’s effort and help as needed

Remember - make it fun, exciting, and comfortable for your child to take these first steps into reading!