Why and How I Taught My 3-Year-Old to Read

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When people find out my son (who is around 3 and a quarter) is reading I naturally get a lot of questions about how I taught him to read so young. But I also think there's a more important first question. Why teach a 3-year-old to read? I do not think 3-year-olds need to be reading and this is why I do not talk about my son’s reading very frequently.

The answer is simply that this was the time that was right for him. It is not the standard timeline and that doesn’t make it either better or worse.

I was not planning on pushing early academics with him. I am a firm believer that every child is ready when they are ready and I had no interest in trying to force him to learn something he wasn’t interested in. We started a little bit of at home preschool at 2.5 but what that meant was having set time to spend in the playroom (where I have some classic Montessori materials). My son did not know his letters at 2 or 2.5. I tried to expose him to the alphabet by having letters around but I was not focused on it. I rarely read alphabet books and I definitely didn’t bring out any flashcards or educational videos.

We did read a lot of books. Most days I spend hours reading to him. We also played rhyming games and phonemic awareness games where we isolated the first sound in a word. These were all just done through everyday life and my son always loved them.

Then a couple of months before my son turned 3 he became intensely interested in the alphabet. He started singing the alphabet song despite me never teaching it to im (it is one of the tracks on his Toniebox) and pulling out a certain alphabet book we have constantly. He would go through it and ask about letters. He would see letters in everyday life and ask. At this point, I decided to do a letter of the week with him and see how it went.

It went so well except that one letter wasn’t enough. He was asking for more letters daily. He was connecting the sound with the letter names he knew from the alphabet song and asking for specific letters. Three weeks in I gave up on letter of the week and he learned all the letters in a few days.

In the next few weeks, he started blending them together and was able to read CVC words. At this point I decided to give him some more intentional phonics instruction. Why? Because I never had phonics instruction. I read before I was ever taught to read and though I became a great reader I really wish I was taught the mechanics. I also grew up in an era when phonics was not particularly in vogue so I likely wouldn’t have learned phonics if I didn’t read until first grade either.

There is one more aspect of the why though. I know there is a large push for non-academic pre-Ks and a delay of formal academics until around 6. I think in many (probably most) cases this is fantastic. At the same time, I vividly remember in the years before I was 6 complaining to my mom that my play-based school was not meeting my academic interests. To their credit, I was moved into a class with an upper grade but it still was not meeting my needs. Every child is different. Six is likely a good age for many children to learn to read. But, just as later might be better for some children, earlier is for others. I was identified as gifted in elementary school. I suspect my son is too, though I would not get him tested this young. A lot of the criticism of introducing phonics and letters early mentions that it can be taught so quickly and easily when they are ready, but it will be a slow drag before then. With my son that was my experience around his 3rd birthday. He was ready and learning to read has been wildly quick and easy for him. One of the reasons I wanted to homeschool was to meet my children where they are when they are ready.

How I Taught My 3-Year-Old to Read

So for the how… I have a blog post on prereading skills we worked on and how we introduced a letter of the week. Letter of the week was so fun while it lasted but it didn’t last long for us. Soon after my son learned the alphabet I noticed he was able to blend sounds together. I had modeled this for him by showing him with short words and slowly sounding them out, but for the most part he just picked this up. At this point, I wanted to support him in his reading journey.

The first formal thing I tried was the book “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.” I knew others who did it with their 4-year-olds so it seemed like an approachable option for a younger child who was interested. It is mega popular but both of us really really despised it. I know that is strong wording, but people speak so highly of it and it did not fit our style at all. Two lessons in and we ditched it. We found it both too much and too little at the same time. It is not very hands-on. The pages are full of text with little breaking it up, it spends a lot of time on repetition and correcting any mistakes immediately. It starts off very slowly, but I do believe it speeds up significantly later. I was inspired to play a few games from it such as fast and slow in everyday life with Y. I would say words very slowly as if sounding them out and let him figure out what they were. I am grateful to have learned that from the book because I think it was part of what helped his early blending. But the actual book was not something either of us enjoyed. Knowing Y and his love for reading books, I am very glad we did not stick with it. It has a unique text it uses until near the end of the curriculum. This is meant to make it easier for beginners as each sound is associated with one specific symbol but it would have made it much more challenging for Y to read other decodable books. So, while many I know love it, it was not for us.

At this point, we spent a bit of time with me just supporting what I was seeing him able to do. For example, I noticed that he blended 2 letters pretty easily but struggled with 3 letter words. I would write a word such as “at” and then we would use the moveable alphabet to add a first letter to make a CVC (consonant vowel consonant) word. I would then change the first letter: mat, cat, bat, pat, etc. He loved this and it really built up his confidence in blending. We also worked on encoding with the moveable alphabet, spelling CVC words.

After that, I offered several materials from Project Based Primary on our shelf to expose him to more CVC word reading. She gifted me her phonics course, Raising Little Readers, at this point and this was very helpful in giving me a blueprint on where to go next and providing me with lots of materials. He loved her clip cards where he found the CVC word for the picture and activities matching words with pictures. He practiced reading her fluency strips which were a great starting point for sentences as he initially found books, even the simplest ones, a bit intimidating. We used her blends sound sort to practice some blend words as well. In the car, he would ask me to write words on his boogie board and I would write CVC words for him. I also purchased some decodable books he could read on his own and the game Word Seeds which he loved playing to practice decoding words. I also made some materials myself.

As his confidence with CVC words increased I again wanted to try some sort of curriculum to make sure we were truly learning the phonics behind reading and setting a solid foundation, especially as he was picking up some non-CVC words. I felt nervous about eventually introducing some of the vowel patterns that make multiple sounds, etc. Also, since I plan to homeschool, I wanted a curriculum we could stick with to avoid gaps. I had always planned on using All About Reading in Kindergarten. I decided to look at their materials and saw he was already well into level 1 with his learning. I ordered level 1 and figured we would see how it went. I am working on a longer review of All About Reading, but it was wildly successful for us. He breezed through level 1 in just a bit over a month (a note that this is not the usual timeline for a level and is not the expectation. I spoke with support from All About Reading for a question I had and they were shocked by his progress). He was constantly asking for more activities, more stories to read, etc. We ended up doing more than a lesson a day because he always wanted more. I added some other materials as I saw fit, mostly things I made as well as a few lessons from The Good and The Beautiful which is available online for free. He loves their books and their order for introducing concepts is a bit different than All About Reading which is why I did a few concepts using their materials.

We recently finished All About Reading Level 2 and jumped into Level 3. We still absolutely love it. He still looks forward to lesson time every day and asks for more stories to read and more activities. I bought a couple of the Kindergarten and first-grade level readers from The Good and the Beautiful because he wanted more stories. In one sitting he went through each of the Kindergarten readers (each with 20+ stories that are meant to be read throughout the Kindergarten year!). I plan to order some of the second grade readers soon. He also loves the decodables from Charge into Reading and reads those daily as well. He has more recently moved past decodables and loves stories such as Little Bear.

For the first part of All About Reading Level 1 he was still slowly sounding out nearly all words. Though this stage wasn’t actually all that long it definitely felt long. Even if he had seen a word on the page before he would still sound it out again every single time. There reached a point where he would even quietly say the word and then proceed to sound it out. But, around halfway through level 1 he stopped sounding out the majority of words. From there his reading really took off and he has learned quickly as I have introduced him to new material. A few weeks ago I realized he is also able to figure out a lot of new words on his own from knowledge of other words and some context clues (within the sentence, not just looking at photos- those are two different things!). This was well illuminated when I was talking about what patterns he had learned with my husband and he overheard me mention oo as something that had not been taught. He started going “ooooo.” This has allowed me to move him slowly away from purely decodable texts.

We have not heavily relied on sight words, but we have introduced some. All About Reading very much limits the introduction of sight words, but we took a middle ground between their approach and some of the sight word-heavy approaches. Introducing a few extra sight words opened up more texts for Y to read and also helped him with a tad more fluency in the stage when he was sounding out all the decodable words. At this point, most sight words are decodable for him with his phonetic skills, but the ones that are rule breakers (for example “said”) I have introduced as sight words. Some others were introduced earlier than he learned the phonetic pattern. For those I would explain the phonetic pattern and we would often play games with the cards. We would do things like a bean bag toss on the cards, freeze dance saying the word as we stop on it, etc. As he progressed he did learn them much faster though and we don’t play those sorts of games for new words so much anymore. Generally seeing the word in a couple contexts is enough.

I get asked a lot how to teach reading to a 3-year-old. This post covers how I taught my son to read at three from when he first started reading until now. His reading moved a lot more quickly than I anticipated. It has been very easy to teach him and I’m not sure how much I can truly take credit for. I do not doubt that he would have become a confident reader quickly without my help. For me though, having been frustrated myself as a preschooler and Kindergartener with the lack of formal reading instruction even when I was explicitly requesting it and then teaching myself without any actual phonics instruction it was important to me I offered him the support to learn reading in a more formal and structured way.