# Teaching My Toddler To Read

I have been teaching my oldest son to read with Anki and techniques recommended [here on LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2PLBhCbByRMaEKimo/spaced-repetition-for-teaching-two-year-olds-how-to-read) as well as in [Larry Sanger's post](http://blog.larrysanger.org/2010/12/baby-reading/), and it's going great! I thought I'd pay it forward a bit by talking about the techniques I've been using.

Anki and songs for letter names and sounds
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When he was a little under 2, he started learning letters from the alphabet song. We worked on learning the names and sounds of letters using the ABC song, plus the [Letter Sounds song](https://youtu.be/ffeZXPtTGC4) linked by [Reading Bear](https://www.readingbear.org/LetterSounds.aspx). He loved the Letter Sounds song, so we listened to / watched that a lot; Reading Bear has some other resources that other kids might like better for learning letter names and sounds as well.

Around this age, we also got magnet letters for the fridge and encouraged him to play with them, praised him greatly if he named them or made their sound pointing at them, and played with them ourselves to show him. I think this was somewhat helpful. We also tried the first Your Baby Can Read video (the first one is available for free on YouTube), but it didn't seem all that helpful and the further ones were very expensive so I dropped that.

At some point we started doing Anki flashcards for each letter. I tried for a while to find a premade Anki deck and then just gave up and made cards myself. The AnkiDroid app actually makes this very easy to do on your phone. The letters it displays are very small, so instead of using those, I used the "Draw" functionality to just draw a big colorful version of each letter with my finger, then I put a picture of something with that letter (preferably with the simple phonetic version of the letter-- eg A should be "apple" not "ape"; X should be "box" or "fox" not "xylophone") on the other side of the card. To get him more excited about it, I also recorded myself saying the name and sound of the letter, and tried to find words with each letter that he'd be most excited about-- he loves animals, so mostly this meant including animals as much as possible. For some words, I included pictures of our family or familiar places and things ("mama" for M, etc.).

We added just a couple new cards per day, and I had a hard limit of no more than 10 reviews per day for him. I praised him and acted very excited when he did letters with me (not hard for me, I *was* excited about it!). If he got bored and wandered away, I would just let him. I got him interested enough at this age that he didn't really need much incentive to "do letters," especially for just a few reviews per day. We added incentives later on; more about that below.

At this stage I was most concerned with verifying that he recognized and distinguished the letters. His pronunciation was still very bad, but I could still verify that he knew the letter "N" by prompting him to say a word starting with it: "N is for n... n..." would often result in him completing it with "narwhal!" (but possibly pronounced "yarwhal").

We started with just capital letters; once he had those down, I added another set of lowercase cards, using mostly the same pictures as for the uppercase.

In general, "if something is too hard, add more Anki cards for the same letter/concept presenting the cue in a different way" seems to help a lot. Or changing the cards up to make them more fun-- including sounds, different pictures, more pictures, etc. I focused hard on making it fun and quick.

I am in the very beginning Anki stage now with my second son (19mo), who is learning to talk at the same time as he learns his letters.[^5ys03wo6pd] I'm still keeping it very low-key with him. If I can't get him to say a letter-- he just stares at me-- I just suspend the card and move on. We'll get to all of them eventually. For him, I've also started including alphabet cards that have a picture of an Alphablocks character, not just the letter itself, which seems to help cue him for the letters. Later I plan to make sure he can get each letter just from the written form, once he's got the Alphablocks versions down.

Anki + Reading Bear word list for words
---------------------------------------

Once my older son had the letters and letter sounds down, it was time to start on Words.

My main source for words was the Reading Bear list, pulled from the [Teacher's Guide](https://www.readingbear.org/docs/TeacherGuide_WordList_2016.pdf) on their website (Appendix A has a complete word list for their modules).

My procedure for this was: 

*   Make 10-20 new Anki cards in each batch, pulling from the Reading Bear word list. I usually added about half the words in the Reading Bear list, making sure to hit all the major subcategories (eg within the "short a" section, make sure I hit some words with no consonant at the beginning, some words with specific difficult consonants, etc.).
    *   I made (and make) all the cards on my phone with AnkiDroid.
    *   Every card got a picture on the back side. I would search the web for stock photos or use photos of our family or house where possible.
    *   I still draw each word on his flash cards by hand, because the bigger colorful letters are easier for him to read. Near the beginning, I would add sound files of me sounding out the words; I don't bother with this anymore, but I think it helped him get the concepts of sounding out early on.
*   Add 2 new Anki cards per day that we did reviews. If a new card introduces a new phonics concept, teach it first before asking them to review it. Examples:
    *   "a makes an a sound. c... a... t. Put them together. cat."
    *   "o and r *together* make an or sound."
    *   "oo sometimes says \[oo as in too\] and sometimes says \[oo as in good\]. Try both and see if you can figure out which one it is in this word."
*   I kept the number of reviews per day very limited. It used to be 15 cards per day. Now we can do 12 cards per day *including* 2 new cards, because FSRS is so much more efficient. (Make sure you have FSRS enabled! I learned about it from [this blog post](https://domenic.me/fsrs/).) I also set a time box on Anki of 10 minutes, which we rarely exceeded.
*   If a phonics concept seemed very easy-- he was getting all the flashcards on the first try easily, even new ones he'd never seen before-- I would sometimes suspend upcoming cards in that section so we could move on sooner.
*   If a phonics concept seemed hard-- he wasn't getting it after repeated reviews-- I would add more cards from that section and/or slow down new reviews until he had it down better. I never added a new phonics concept until he had the last one down cold.
*   I was liberal about hitting the "Again" button if he missed something. Now that we've switched to FSRS, I'm even more liberal about this, because it's less punishing when you miss a card that you previously knew.

IMPORTANT: In addition to the Reading Bear list, I also added a set of words that were of interest to my particular child. For example: his name, his brother's name, "Mama," "Dada," the names of his favorite animals, etc. I think this was key to helping hold his interest and get him excited about words and letters.

At the very beginning, I didn't try very hard to make sure he wasn't just memorizing the whole word. I think this was fine. As we added more words, it became clearly necessary for him to do sounding out, and so he started doing it consistently pretty early on. We are almost 2 years in now (he is 3.5), and he is just starting to skip sounding out short words like "cat" or "dad" and say them directly instead.

He had trouble mixing up his "b"s and "d"s for a while. I looked this up and added a couple Anki flashcards with the word "bed" and a graphic where you hold each hand up to show a "b" with your left and "d" with your right, and cued him by prompting "which is your b hand and which is your d hand? Now is that a b or a d?" I think this was a bit helpful in getting him over the hump, and now he just has the difference memorized.

Decodable sentences and books for learning to read
--------------------------------------------------

At some point, I thought to myself, "He's learned quite a lot of words now, maybe we should start on actually *reading*?"

I started by adding a couple short phrases and sentences to his Anki deck. "Fat cat" and "foxes can hunt" were some of the first ones. Previously we had been doing "say all the letter sounds, then blend the whole word" all the time. It was a very new concept for him to say all the letter sounds *in just one word* and then say *that whole word* before sounding out each following word, and then another big jump to try and say *the whole sentence at once* after sounding out and saying each word. He kept trying to sound out every single letter sound in the phrase before saying the words: "f... a... t... c... a..... t... FATCAT" instead of "f... a... t... fat, c... a... t..., cat". I had to correct him on this repeatedly, especially at first. I think pushing the "only sound out ONE word at a time" thing early was very important as a building block for doing longer sentences later.

Not long after that, I decided to try writing sentences out on pieces of paper, separate from Anki, to simulate an experience more like reading a real book.

The very first sentence I tried to do with him was "\[little brother\] drinks from a sippy cup. I drink from a big kid cup." I wrote it with a crayon on paper and drew two pictures of cups. This was terrible for several reasons:

*   Way too many words.
*   Too many hard exception words. He was good at consonant clusters by then, but "I" and "from" were out of his known set.
*   Multiple sentences on one page, too intimidating.

I quickly learned some principles to go from there:

*   As few exception words as possible. Do not use any common exception words unless he's already put them in Anki and memorized them, eg "you," "where," "the," "that," "this."
*   Put things in Anki if I want to include them in future sentences. This is around when I put "the," "this," and "that" in his deck, which helped a lot.
*   Exception words were okay ONLY if 1) there were not too many of them, 2) they were words that helped tell a much more interesting story (like "lion" or "zebra" or "Pikachu"), and 3) I would help him with them and not require him to read them all by himself.
*   Shorter sentences (at least to start). He was just too intimidated by long ones. Medium-long words were ok as long as they were in his phonics set. 5ish words per sentence was best.

With these principles, we started doing sentences more and more often, and I started writing miniature books for him. One of the first ones was "The lion got a gift", which I wrote and illustrated with markers on printer paper:

*   "The lion got a gift."
*   "The gift is a hat."
*   "A fox grabs the hat."
*   "Stop, fox, stop!"
*   "The lion got the fox. Get the hat back!"
*   "The lion put the fox in the box."
*   "Fox in box. Happy fox."
*   "Lion with hat."

The only exception words in this book are "lion" and "the", both of which he memorized individually pretty early on. ("a" is also an exception, which I have mostly been skipping over but may add to his Anki deck as he keeps pronouncing it with a short "a" sound instead of a long "a" or schwa when he encounters it.)

I was very proud of this one. It was the first time he actively asked me to read the next page of the book because he wanted to see what happened next!

I investigated commercial options for decodable books for him, and was not impressed by the selection available. I heard the All About Reading books recommended, and purchased a few of those. They are good at strict decodability and somewhat interesting, but my son still vastly preferred the sentences that I wrote for him, so I kept making them. Recently I bought a laminator, holepunch, and some keyrings, so that now I can "bind" them in a way that is somewhat proof against his younger brother who loves to rip paper.

![piece of paper reading "Mercury is near the sun" with a diagram](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/0bc60572d2f04da77e2eaee24e6d7d86552958671a2c1bae.jpg)

For this one, I read the word "Mercury" for him as an exception. This is part of a short book with a decodable fact about each planet.

![picture of a child holding a book saying "grr!" and the words "Reading is not easy"](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/c80561390a6af65e4c99e7f727fd032b316fec66b0216b07.jpg)

This sentence came after he learned the "ea" and "ng" combinations. We also did words ending with "y" early on.

I'm starting to think I should actually start making digital versions of these to share, or even look into self-publishing options, because the state of the art in decodable books is so poor that I'm improving on it every day just writing little books for my son. If you're interested in this, let me know.

Incentives
----------

Around the time we started words, he wasn't as motivated, and we ended up taking a  month or two break from doing Anki at all. I didn't want to push him.

When he was around 2.5, we started watching Numberblocks. Numberblocks is a pedagogical masterpiece for teaching toddlers about math. Also, my son absolutely loved it, and it comes in convenient 5-minute increments. So I started offering an incentive: if he did his words with me, he would get to watch 2 episodes of Numberblocks (if he did half, he would get 1 episode). He was just old enough to understand this concept and it got him excited about words again. We started doing them every single day. He had very limited access to TV apart from that, so it was very motivating.

After he turned 3, I came up with a scheme to start incorporating more complex incentives. I made a set of round wooden tokens with a (1) on them in Sharpie. I also bought him a closable jar and labeled it "\[NAME'S\] TOKENS" (so that they don't get lost or stolen by his younger brother, and to give him a feeling of ownership).

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/3f44bde56b8cd6a21628975e8f8c72e66dde67adb3c17dbb.jpg)

 Now, when he does his Anki reviews, he gets 2 tokens. One token is redeemable for one episode of Numberblocks or Alphablocks. We have a scheme of prices for different TV shows; the base rate is 5 minutes of TV per token, with some shows being subsidized or penalized depending on how educational they are:

*   Numberblocks/Alphablocks: 1 token per 5-minute episode (1 token for 2 three-minute episodes of Alphablocks)
*   Between the Lions: 3 tokens for a 25-minute episode (subsidized)
*   Pokemon, Avatar the Last Airbender, or Winnie the Pooh: 5 tokens for a 25-minute episode
*   Wile. E Coyote: 3 tokens for a 7-minute episode (taxed for brainrot)

When we added decodable sentences/books, he started getting 1 token per sentence. Now that he's reading more, I award either 1 token per "hard" decodable book page or per 2 "easy" pages, at my discretion.

We recently added a token as an incentive for behaving well at tooth brushing time, which was a trouble spot for us behaviorally, and it worked beautifully. Someday we might give them out as incentives for other good behavior. We have also told my son that they are redeemable for money at a rate of 25 cents each, although he hasn't shown much interest in that yet.[^9yvjm0elvsk]

So far he has mostly earned tokens and then immediately spent them on TV shows, but we have had a few times when he earns them and holds on to them for later, usually at times when we can't watch TV immediately.

Reflections so far
------------------

After a couple years and at the age of 3.5, my son is now starting to read more fluently and is getting increasingly excited about reading the decodable books that I make for him. He now often tries to read words he sees in the wild. Recently he was reading a decodable book to his friend's dad, and when I reached over to help prompt him with a hard part, he said "NO!! I can read it ALL BY MYSELF!!" It's so rewarding to see how far he's come, and I can tell he's proud of his progress too.

I also feel really good about the path we've taken to get here. We've kept it short and voluntary and never forced him into it. Using TV as an incentive is a bit of a brute-force implement, but I feel it's been extremely worthwhile overall. 

I don't think you *have* to do this with your child for them to learn to read or anything like that, and I don't have a strong opinion on whether it's going to influence his trajectory later in life. But I've had a blast doing it with him, and I think we will have more fun reading together earlier in his childhood because he's learning this skill so early. I would highly recommend doing this with your kid if you have the time and energy. Just 15 minutes a day of reading practice can get you amazingly far.

[^5ys03wo6pd]: I wasn't planning to start this early, but he was getting excited about pointing out letters in the world himself and saying "O! O!" He actively wanted to do Anki because he saw his big brother doing it, AND... he learned very early that doing Anki led to TV rewards. 

[^9yvjm0elvsk]: "Why not just use real money?" Mainly because we also have a younger toddler and coins are a choking hazard.