Teaching toddlers to read

“When I talk about reading, I’m talking about the ability to look at two or three letters, to slowly sound those out, and to put them together.”

Spencer Russell, founder of Toddlers Can Read

This bonus episode features an interview with Spencer Russell, the dad behind Toddlers Can Read. Spencer struggled to learn to read as a kid, so when it came time to choose a career, he set out to help others avoid the same experience and took a job with Teach for America, continuing as a kindergarten and first-grade teacher in Houston, Texas. 

When he started teaching, Spencer’s students were scoring well below average on national standardized tests. But by the time he stepped away from the profession, 60% of his students advanced 1.5 years in their reading skills, and over half scored at or above the 82nd percentile, earning him national recognition. After becoming a parent, Spencer focused on his son, teaching him letter sounds at 18 months.

By 2 years old, his son was reading on his own! Which is the genesis of Spencer’s program, Toddlers Can Read. So effective are his tips for teaching reading, his social channels have over half-a-billion views. We at Lovevery teamed up with Spencer to create the best at-home reading program in the world, The Reading Skills Set. 

Transcript:

Why early literacy is important

Jessica: So I want to get right into it. Why do we need to focus on early literacy skills at age two and three? Why not save literacy for the school years? 

Spencer: Yeah, that’s a great question and to be super, super clear, you definitely can save it for the school year. But one of the big reasons why I encourage parents to get started in teaching their kids or helping their kids with reading early, if they want to, is because kids can do it. Kids can tackle this. And when we teach kids to read early, we’re often giving them even more time to learn some of those basic skills.

We can make it a game. We can make it fun, engaging. We can spend that quality one-on-one time with our kid and we can get them reading really, really well before they ever go to school. And this isn’t about getting As or going to Harvard, it’s not about being ahead of other kids or being the best mom on Instagram. It’s about giving our kid a shot to learn at their pace, giving them an opportunity to make reading fun, which very few kids ever get the chance for it to be fun. And it’s about spending meaningful one-on-one time with our kids doing something that’s ultimately going to help set them up for success in life. So you definitely don’t need to do it, but I want to just open by letting folks know that if you want to, you certainly can.

Jessica: I’m having a really hard time imagining a two-year old reading. Can you paint this picture for me? ‘Cause my kids were not reading at two. One of them was starting to learn the letter sounds at three, but help give me a picture of who you are working with in your account Toddlers Can Read, and how you’re making that impact.

Spencer: For sure. And I think when a lot of us think of reading, we’re thinking of the reading we do as adults, or maybe we’re thinking about the reading that kids do in elementary school once they’re reading chapter books and they’re able to kind of read fluently in their head. When I talk about reading, I talk about the ability to look at two or three letters, to slowly sound those out, and to put them together. And yes, eventually it does get faster, but reading is not all equal. There are levels and stages that we walk kids through to ultimately become fluent readers. So the parents who follow my page, who’ve either bought my courses or who are using the Reading Skillset, oftentimes we have very, very normal two or three or four-year-olds who may have some sort of curiosity with letters or with books or we have parents who want to expose their kids to this content early.

Again, nothing special about the kid, it’s just a regular toddler who is on this reading journey and we teach them a couple letter sounds. For example, I might teach them “a” and “t” and once they can recognize those letter sounds, we teach them to start combining them together into words. So we start to stretch it “a… t”, “a… t”, “at” and when we pair those two skills, knowing the letter sounds and being able to blend, we have a kid who is now reading. And sure, from there we can go to longer and longer words. We can add in more advanced phonics rules, we can start to read faster and smoother. But reading at its core is very, very basic. It seems complicated, but it can be very, very simple. And that’s what we want to teach to our toddlers, if we choose to teach them to read.

Is singing the alphabet helpful?

Jessica: Okay. So I thought that when I was singing the alphabet song with my toddler in my lap that we were working on reading. Can you help explain how singing the alphabet may not be actually teaching kids to read? 

Spencer: Yeah, singing the alphabet is a wonderful activity for just spending time with your kid, for oral language, for singing, for song, for fun, for play. But as a strategy to actually teach kids to read, it’s not super effective because it’s focused on the letter names like A, B, and C instead of the letter sounds “a”, “b”, “c”. And it’s the sounds that we ultimately read. It’s also giving kids the letters in order instead of being able to see them in any position, which is what we need when we’re reading, when we’re reading books the letters don’t appear A, B, C, D, E, F, G, they appear S, I, T, makes sit. So we need to know what those sounds are and how to blend them in any particular order.

So it is not a bad thing. It is fun, it’s just not going to teach your kid to read. Because I played lots and lots of songs for my students in the classroom. And my students could sing the songs, they could rap the songs, they loved the songs, they danced to the songs, but then on the tests they never knew the content because they had learned a song, not a concept. So we want to separate the two and have songs for fun, for language, for play, and then when it comes time to actually teach or practice the skills, we want to focus on exactly what skill it is that our kid is learning.

Teaching reading before kindergarten

Jessica: So then now, now I really want to know, what other things did you wish that parents had done with their children before they entered your kindergarten classroom? Around reading.

Spencer: Around reading specifically, there’s a lot of things, but I think one of the biggest things I wish parents knew was that reading to your child does not teach them how to read. And even further past that, having your child be able to memorize and recite words back to you doesn’t mean that they’re reading either. There is kind of one way to know that a kid can read, which is do they know the letter sounds and can they stretch them together, and they need to be taught those letter sounds and taught how to stretch. Now like singing the A, B, C song, parents should be reading to their kids. I will go so far as to say that every parent should be reading books to and with their kids. It’s just not going to be the thing that ultimately gets them reading.

What we actually need to do is put our kids in the driver’s seat. We need to slowly work and build and coach them through this process of learning how to read. And I don’t need my parents to do this before kindergarten. I just want them to know that this is how reading works. Because I can’t tell you the number of parents who wish they had this information or put their kids in my class thinking they could read, having invested a lot of time and energy with them, having invested money and resources in their daycare and their pre-K, only to realize after the kid joins the class, they’ve never actually built that skill.

How to teach letter sounds

Jessica: So I’m going to get into a cheat sheet right now for parents. I discovered your account and I’m really in love with the content that you share. And I know that you have letter sound flashcards. How do you actually teach letter sounds to a child? What are your tips? 

Spencer: Yeah, teaching letter sounds is the best. It is so much fun. And one of the easiest ways to start teaching your kid to read. So parents love this, kids love this, tried and true. What I recommend folks do is pick three sounds and teach those. You don’t want to start with one. And this is really, really key. A lot of parents pick one letter sound, they show it to their kid, the kid learns the A says “a”, and then every letter after that you show your toddler they’re going to call it “a” too. They’ve generalized, “When I see this flashcard thing, or I see a letter-type shape, it says ‘a’.”

It’s very hard for them to understand after that that each one is different. So we want to show them at least two at a time. I like three. But you can adjust up or down based on your kid. Once you’ve picked two or three letters, you’re going to play games with them. Have your kid looking at, focused on, engage with that sound, as much as possible. If you’re using the flashcards on my site, you can put them down on the ground and have them jump on them. I worked with a child last week who was a quarterback. He played football, he’s five years old and I held up the sounds and in order to be able to throw the ball at the sound, he had to say the sound correctly first.

Eventually our kid learns those sounds, we can put them to the side and pick two or three more. Typically, this doesn’t take longer than a couple days for them to learn these sounds if we’re consistent with playing games. But that’s one of the easiest entry ways and ways for parents to get started with teaching their kids these letter sounds.

Jessica: And I want to clarify just a couple days per group of letter sounds like three or four, but not a few days to learn all of them, right? 

Spencer: Correct.

Jessica: Okay. And then another thing that I’m embarrassed to say, I don’t think I learned to read through phonics. When it came to trying to help my child learn their letter sounds, I got tripped up with vowels, because they have all these different sounds. How do we know what to start with? 

Spencer: It does get confusing. And the important part is that we don’t let the confusion and the complexity keep us back from actually just engaging with the work. Because when you get started, it is just the 26 basic single letter sounds. So that would be the five short vowel sounds “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “u”. We teach those first. And once our kids are reading basic words, for example, cat has the “a” sound, pet has the “e” sound, pin has the “i” sound, once kids are reading words with those basic short vowels, then we can start to introduce the long vowels, the A, E, I, O, U, and some of the different spellings that we can use for those vowels. But we start basic first and then we have time later to learn some of the advanced sounds and the advanced rules.

How to teach sound blending

Jessica: Okay. I’m feeling like this is more approachable now. Thank you. And then how about the next step? What happens after they understand their letter sounds? 

Spencer: After they understand the letter sounds, and really as they’re understanding the letter sounds, we teach them how to blend the sounds together into words. There’s two ways to teach blending. One way to teach blending is all out loud, it’s oral. So we can do this, while pushing our kid in the stroller, at the store, at home, in the bathtub. It doesn’t matter. We don’t need any materials in front of us. We just tell our little one, two sounds like, “i” “n” and we start to stretch them together with our kid “i…n”, “i…n” “in”. The other way is written down, where we would write down those two letters, the I and the N, and we’d point to them and we’d start to say the sounds same way, “i”, “n”, “in”, and we help focus our kids’ attention on those letter sounds as we stretch them together.

At the very beginning of the blending process, kids look at you with no idea what’s going on. They don’t know what you’re asking of them, what you want them to do. So many of us think that blending is just such a basic skill: “i”, “n”, it makes “in”, that’s so easy. For our kids it’s really not. They need to be taught and it does become easy with practice. But the key, once they know the letter sounds and even before they know the letter sounds, we can do this all out loud, is to practice that blending skill. Be really slow, really patient with our kids through this process. And eventually it clicks. They’ve got those two sounds and now we start to practice blending three sounds, four sounds, five sounds.

Tips for teaching your child to read

Jessica: Okay, I got it. So any other tips related to the actual teaching, beginning teaching your child to learn to read? 

Spencer: One big tip is don’t overthink it. A lot of folks make this really complicated. They think about the different rules in the English language, words that don’t seem to make sense. They do a lot of memorizing and they kind of overhype themselves in their head. People do a lot of thought saying, “My kid’s not ready,” or, “They can’t do it. It’s going to be hard, it’s going to be challenging.” They take all this baggage from their own experience and project it onto their kid. I wouldn’t overthink this. You start with letter sounds, two or three of them and just play games.

Eventually start to stretch those letter sounds together really slowly. And your toddler is going to be reading. We can learn advanced stuff after that. We can build a stronger routine as we go. We can figure out the bumps in the road as they occur, but we don’t have to have everything perfect in order to start. We don’t even have to be good teachers or good readers to do this. We just need to start. Literally 30 seconds, 45 seconds, one minute, showing two or three letter sounds to your kid. Keep it consistent and your kid’s going to start to get it. You’re going to start to get it too. And you can always kind of build on and progress from there.

Signs your child is ready to learn to read

Jessica: Okay. This sounds really approachable. So what are some signs that your child might be ready to start to learn to read? Let’s say we’ve got listeners with two, three, four, year-olds at home. What do you want to see in those kids? 

Spencer: So there’s a couple things I’m looking for in the kid and a couple things I’m looking for in the parent. And kids can do this a lot earlier than most folks think, because on the kid’s side, all we need is a kid who can pronounce the letter sounds and they don’t need to be able to pronounce all of them. But you do want them to be able to pronounce the sounds you’re teaching. So maybe your child has 10 letter sounds they can say, those would be a great 10 letter sounds to pull from as you teach them, because it’s going to be easier for your child to be able to learn a sound if they could pronounce the sound. And as a side note, for children who have oral language issues or speech challenges, there are ways to teach kids through identification that don’t require them being able to say the sound.

But as we get started, you can look to your child’s oral language as a clue to whether or not they’re ready to start learning a sound.

Next we look at their memory, and we’re not looking for an incredible memory here, but we do want them to be able to remember simple objects or shapes or colors or names from one day to the next. Because when we teach them the letter sounds, and I teach you, “This, A, says, ‘a’,” I want you to be able to pronounce that sound. And I also want you to be able to remember that sound by the end of the week. So if they’re able to remember very, very simple objects or colors or shapes, they’re also going to be able to remember that the symbol on that flashcard, or that letter in your hand, makes the sound. Then we’re looking at their ability to focus, and this sounds like it’s about the kid. This is really about the parent. It’s, do you believe your kid can focus for your lesson? 

We share some ideas for games and some strategies parents can do to make this fun. You need to decide if you think your kid can focus for that activity. Let’s take the football-throwing example. Do you think your kid would give you a minute or two of throwing the football at the sound? If so, and they’ve got the oral language and they’ve got the memory, it sounds like a great time to get started. If not, then the lesson might not go very well. As a rule of thumb, I always believe in kids. I have never met a kid that I don’t believe can do this. That I don’t believe can focus if I spend time trying to find the right activity. But I do know people feel differently about their kids. I do know people have different situations. So just make sure if the oral language is there, the basic memory skill is there, that you believe that your child can focus for whatever it is that you choose to do for activity.

Finally, I look for the parents’ willingness and readiness to get started, because regardless of whether or not the kid is ready to go, if the parent isn’t ready to go, it’s not going to work. I tell parents all the time, teaching your kid to read can be one of the most fun, enjoyable, just special moments in your relationship with them. Teaching my son was so, so special for us. But if you are hesitant or scared or you feel like you’re going to do your child harm or it’s going to be this negative experience, just wait, there’s no rush here, your kid is still really, really little. So the fourth and final piece is just making sure that you want to get started before you actually jump in and try it with your kid.

How much time is needed to teach reading

Jessica: Okay. And how much time are we talking about, Spencer, to get results? So how many minutes a day or how many minutes a week or… Paint the picture here for taking this on at home? 

Spencer: It’s a wonderful question. I was just thinking back to when I started with my son around 18 months. And we did a couple seconds at a time when we first got started. I mean, it was three sounds. I just wanted him to see them. So I’d carry them around with me, I’d show him, I’d have him repeat very, very quick, couple seconds, multiple times during the day. As he got older, our blocks began to stretch out.

And so it’d go from a couple seconds to 30 seconds to a minute to two minutes to five minutes to 10 minutes. It doesn’t need to be a lot. The key is when we’re working with kids one-on-one at exactly their level, knowing exactly what they need, it is so much more potent and powerful than a really, really long block trying to hit all kids at once. As a first grade teacher, my reading block was 90 minutes. As a dad, a big part of my reading block was five minutes. It’s a lot less than you might think, as long as you’re focused on the specific skills that your kid is working on.

Resources for parents

Jessica: That’s really helpful to know. Okay, so now there are a number of resources that you offer at Toddlers Can Read. Can you walk us through, we also have some resources at Lovevery, can you walk us through what support you have for parents? 

Spencer: Yeah, lots of resources. At Toddlers Can Read, we have free content on our social media. That’s one of the biggest places where parents learn and grow, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, with YouTube being the best of that free info.

We also have a free 30-minute webinar for parents, where we walk through not just how learning to read works, but how to teach your kid to read and how to avoid some of the biggest mistakes that people make as they get started. It is actually 28 minutes flat, and you can change the playback speed. That’s a super, super effective way to get a baseline of where to get started and how to teach your kid to read.

In terms of paid resources, we have physical products and digital products. On the physical side, we have different sets of flashcards that parents can use to teach the letter sounds, as well as easy, decodable books that kids can read as they begin the process of learning how to read.

Then we also have digital courses that kind of position the parents as the teacher, and we take all of the kind of technical science of reading stuff, a lot of the best practices in how to teach literacy, and we boil it down into a 90-minute course that parents can watch and then feel confident to jump in and support their kid.

Jessica: So, Spencer, let’s talk about a lot of resources that parents are turning to. I remember getting a set of Bob Books at Costco and thinking that that was going to teach my kid to read and it was going to be so fun. And then, actually, we ended up with quite a bit of resistance and it was really hard. I don’t think I was well-equipped.

Can you talk to me, what’s the deal with the Bob Books? Can those teach your child to read? 

Spencer: Bob Books can be a helpful resource to support your kid’s reading. But they’re not going to teach your kid to read on their own.

And one of the biggest reasons is because it doesn’t teach your kid the code of phonics. Your child needs to know what the letter sounds say and how to combine them together before they can even touch those Bob Books. And part of my frustration with the kind of early-reading industry is there are so many products that have just been the same for the last 10, 20, 30 years and I put Bob Books in this category. It came out, it was fine, not amazing, but it’s never changed. It’s never evolved.

And it hasn’t educated parents on what they can do to actually support their kid’s reading, which is why you see these sitting in people’s homes and they kind of cross their fingers and hope the book is somehow magically going to do it, when that’s not something the book can do. The book is a tool to use in conjunction with actually supporting your child with these skills.

Why we should stop talking about the literacy crisis

Jessica: This has been such a valuable conversation, Spencer, I want to end on a question and it relates to a keynote that you gave: Why we should stop talking about the literacy crisis. Can you tell me more about that? 

Spencer: I certainly can. In the science of reading space, we have spent a lot of time the last several years arguing, fighting wars online, typing on our keyboards, putting people down, over the exact right way to teach this or teach that. And the reading wars, as they’re called, ultimately do very, very little to help parents with their kids. So, as someone whose primary goal is to help give as many kids as possible the opportunity to be a confident and successful reader, the way that my son is, the way that I wish I was, I’m not concerned with this argument, this debate. I’m not concerned with putting these different people down or fighting over the exact right strategy. I’m concerned with whether we’re actually reaching kids and reaching the families who have the best ability to support them.

So, this is a message really, really focused on the kind of academic reading space generally. There’s a lot of thought leaders, there’s a lot of research, there’s a lot of discussion and debate online. There’s not a lot of action.

And prior to Toddlers Can Read and Lovevery, there’s been very few people who’ve actually made a stance and a commitment to help get good products in the hands of families and to educate them on how to use them. So, I’m not concerned with what people are talking about, I’m concerned with what they’re actually doing.

Jessica: Thank you so much, Spencer, really, really helpful. We appreciate the service that you bring to so many families every single day through your accounts: Toddlers Can Read. Thank you so much for being with us.

Spencer: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Takeaways:

1. Make it a game: Children often learn literacy skills early when it feels like play. Teaching them to read sooner gives them more time to master these foundational skills.
   
2. Start simple: Begin with just three sounds and review them for a few seconds, multiple times a day. As your child grows, you can gradually extend the length of your practice sessions.
   
3. Turn learning into fun: Spencer suggests making the process playful. For example, have your child say the sound correctly before throwing a ball at the letter, making it an interactive game.
   
4. Teach blending: Once your child grasps individual sounds, help them blend the sounds into words. Practice orally or using paper. For instance, review how “iii” and “nnn” makes “in” — slowly and patiently.
   
5. Feeling motivated? Here are 4 signs your child is ready to read:

• They have strong oral language skills and can pronounce most sounds.
• They show a good memory.
• They can focus on sound games.
• You feel confident in supporting their reading journey!

Spencer’s literacy materials can be found at ToddlersRead.com, including a free Beginning Reading Workshop aimed at empowering parents to teach their toddlers to read. Plus, get access to a limited-time, webinar-only discount on the new Reading Skill Set by Lovevery.