The human brain is prewired to do things like talk and walk, but reading is a complex skill that must be deliberately and methodically taught. 

According to psychologist and literacy expert Dr. Hollis Scarborough, children need to master two main categories of skills to become fluent readers: language comprehension and word recognition. Comprehension can be supported early on by talking, singing, and reading to your child, asking questions about a story, and wondering out loud. But word recognition rarely happens naturally—it requires direct instruction and years of practice.

In this article:

• When do children learn to read?
• How do children learn to read?
• Early literacy skills and activities 
• How to support your child’s reading skills
• What are good children’s books for early readers?

When do children learn to read?

There’s no single age when every child learns to read. Some start decoding as early as preschool, while others need more time for reading to “click.” No matter when it happens or how easily it comes, your child will need lots of support and practice at home to master the skills involved.

What does it mean to be a fluent reader? In broad terms, fluency is the ability to blend sounds together quickly and accurately, recognize familiar words by sight, and understand the meaning of text. It’s a process, not a moment—and that process takes time ❤️

How do children learn to read?

Research has shown that learning to read involves developing several interrelated skills at the same time. To become a fluent reader, your child needs to:

• Break words down into their individual sounds
• Know the sounds each letter makes
• Recognize both uppercase and lowercase letter forms
• Learn how to blend sounds together to make words
• Approach irregular words by sounding out the parts they know and memorizing the rest
• Understand the meaning of what they read, from individual words to the text as a whole
• Read regularly—both alone and with experienced readers—to gain fluency, expression, comprehension, and confidence

These skills develop most naturally when your child enjoys the process and experiences success along the way. Games, activities, and decodable books help your child build on their current skills without becoming overwhelmed.

Early literacy skills and activities

Years before your child reads their first book independently, you can help them by building their:

• Receptive and expressive vocabulary
• Print awareness and print concepts
• Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness
• Alphabet knowledge 
• Ability to blend letter sounds to make words
• Oral language and storytelling

Here’s a look at what these early literacy skills are, how they develop, and ways you can support them.

1. Receptive and expressive vocabulary

In the early years, young children understand more words than they can say—their receptive vocabulary develops earlier than their expressive vocabulary. Studies show that the more words children understand by preschool age, the better they’ll do with reading later on. 

At some point, your child will be able to use most of the words they already understand in conversation—their expressive vocabulary will catch up to the receptive. Reading new words will happen faster and more easily if they already have a rich vocabulary. 

Activities to build vocabulary: 

• Use interesting words—even ones your child doesn’t know yet. It can be tempting to replace rich vocabulary with simpler words, like saying “mad” instead of “furious,” but your child will pick up new words more naturally from context.
• Read every word in a book. Children’s stories often include vocabulary that you may not typically use in everyday conversation. Your child doesn’t have to know every word in a book to understand what’s happening in the story. In fact, the story itself—including photos or illustrations—can help them pick up new words.
• Play with synonyms. Choose a word that can be expressed in many different ways—feelings and simple adjectives work well—and try to list as many words as you can that mean the same thing. For example, you can say, “Let’s come up with all the different ways to say little.” Your child may only be able to supply a word or two at first, but the more you play, the more synonyms they’ll remember. Starting with the same word several times in a row will help them catch on.
• List words by category. Choose a theme—like animals, breakfast foods, or things to do at the park—and name every word you can think of that fits in that category.

2. Print awareness and print concepts

Print awareness refers to an understanding that printed words have meaning, like the word “Stop” on a traffic sign. Print concepts are about how books “work”—including how to hold it, read the words from left to right, and where the title can be found. Surround your child with books and point out different types of print to help them develop this foundational skill years before starting to read.

Print awareness and print concepts include:

• Understanding that printed words convey meaning
• Awareness of print in the environment
• Understanding that print is read in a certain direction—for example, books written in English are read from left to right
• Understanding the physical elements of a book like the cover, title, author, and table of contents

Activities to encourage print awareness:

• Point out words on signs, menus, and recipes, as well as in books you read together, to help your child notice different varieties of print in the world around them.
• Describe and label parts of the books you read—the cover, author, illustrator, and table of contents: “The title of this book is Making Muffins. It’s written here on the cover and over here on the spine.”
• As you read to your child, follow the words with your finger. Besides showing them that text is read from left to right, it also helps them learn that one written word equals one spoken word.

3. Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness

Phonological awareness is a broad term for all the different ways words can be broken into smaller pieces. As your child gains phonological awareness, they begin to understand concepts like compound words, rhyming, and syllables. Phonological awareness is important because it helps new readers link letters to their sounds. That’s the skill they’ll rely on most when they start decoding words.

Phonemic awareness refers to how a word can be broken down to its smallest sounds, which are called phonemes. Phonemes can be individual letters or combinations of letters—like th or ck—that make a single sound. For example, “fish” is made up of three phonemes: /f/, /i/, and /sh/. There are 44 phonemes in the English language.

Activities to encourage phonological awareness and phonemic awareness: 

• Compound words help your child understand that some words are made up of two smaller ones. You can introduce this skill by playing Compound Word Pairs from Part 1 of The Reading Skill Set. In this game, your child joins together pairs of cards that each have half a compound word—like an image of rain with an image of a bow. If they do it correctly, a rainbow appears on the back of the card. You can also point out compound words whenever you encounter them at home—toothbrush, pancake—or on errands—bookstore, highway.
• Rhyming encourages your child to listen closely to the individual sounds within words—especially the last ones. Hearing and confirming a rhyme may be easier for them than producing one on their own, so start by giving them words to compare: “Do hat and bat rhyme? How about hat and cup?” Once your child can recognize rhyming words, they may be ready to make their own rhymes. You can say, “Fly, pie, and tie all rhyme because they all end with the same sound. Can you think of a word that rhymes with go?”
• Syllables are another way that words are broken up into smaller chunks, and they can feel abstract to new readers. You can help your child understand syllables by describing them as the beats of a word: “We can hear the different syllables by listening for the beats while we clap. Let’s try pup·py. I hear two beats in the word puppy, so there are two syllables.”
• Because phonemes are the smallest units of sound, they’ll likely be challenging for your child to identify at first. Start with the beginning sounds of words, which are the easiest to hear and isolate. Tell your child, “Let’s listen for the first sound we hear. I’m going to say a word, then I’ll say the first sound. Van, /v/. Now, you try. What’s the first sound you hear in sit? ”

4. Alphabet knowledge

Reciting the ABCs is the first experience many children have with letters. Repeating a sequence and learning each letter’s name are both valuable. But in order to read, your child needs to learn that each letter has its own shape and represents a specific sound. The shapes combine to make text on a page and the sounds combine to make the words we read.

Activities to encourage alphabet knowledge: 

• Start by focusing on each letter’s most common sound rather than on its name. Many letter names—including h, w, y, and all the vowels—are pronounced differently from their most common sound, which can confuse your child. Instead of saying, “What sound does the letter h make?” point to a printed letter h and ask, “What sound does this letter make?”
• Introduce lowercase letters before uppercase ones. Many—but not all—uppercase letters match their corresponding lowercase form. The vast majority of letters your child encounters will be lowercase, so they need lots of practice recognizing those. 
• Help your child learn to identify upper and lower case partners. As they become more familiar with letter forms, point out how some uppercase and lowercase pairs—like Cc and Ss—look the same, while others—like Aa and Gg—look different.
• Give your child practice identifying letters out of sequence. This helps them distinguish letters by sight rather than by their position in the alphabet. Using sidewalk chalk, write the letters of the alphabet in both lowercase and uppercase—in random order—on the pavement. Then, let your child hop, skip, jump, or twirl to each letter as you call them out: “Hop to the /b/, now skip to the /m/!”

5. Blending letter sounds to make words

Once your child has had some practice identifying individual letter sounds, they’ll be ready to join them together to make words. This is known as blending, and it’s the first real “reading” your child does. Encourage your child to read a word or short sentence again after they blend it the first time, so they can focus on what the words mean and hear the increasing fluency of their own reading. 

Reading the same words again and again also helps your child add these words to their sight vocabulary, a mental list of words they know by heart. This process—called orthographic mapping—is necessary for your child to eventually become a fluent reader.

Activities to encourage blending:

• In order to blend, your child needs to be able to identify each individual sound within a word, then join them all together as a recognizable whole. The Sound Swap & Drop from Part 2 of The Reading Skill Set gives them practice decoding simple words with three sounds, then switching out one of the sounds for another—like turning van into can or bug into big. 
• Play a version of “I Spy,” where you give your child sounds to blend into words. Pick an object with three sounds, like a rug, and say: “I spy a /r/ /u/ /g/.” Your child will need to blend the three sounds together and point out the object. You can also include objects with digraphs, like chin and fish. 
• Your own fluency, error correction, and other reading behaviors are important models for your child. Take turns reading from a simple, familiar book. Start by reading all but one word of a sentence or page, then invite your child to finish it. If you make a mistake, show your child how you correct yourself. You can gradually increase the words they read during their turn until you’re trading off entire pages.

6. Oral language and storytelling

Telling stories—and inviting your child to tell you some of their own—is one of the best ways to develop their language skills. Storytelling helps them learn about narrative structures and practice logical sequencing. It’s also an opportunity to introduce more interesting vocabulary than the words your child tends to hear day to day or even in many of their books.

Activities to encourage storytelling and oral language skills:

• Invite your child to tell you about their day. Help them organize their story by asking, “What happened first? Then what happened?”
• Read wordless picture books, like Sita’s Hike to the Beach from Part 1 of The Reading Skill Set. Invite your child to tell the story their own way, including details from the photographs. If they get stuck, you can try the following prompts:
  • “Who are the characters in the story?”
  • “What time of day is it?”
  • “What happens next?”
  • “How do you think Sita feels right now?”
  • “You can turn the page whenever you’re ready.”

• Practice sequencing in your daily life. For example, you can ask your child how to put the steps of their bedtime routine in order: “You usually take a bath first. What do you do right after that?”
• Play Story Jar. Collect a jar, a piece of paper, and a pencil. Cut the paper into strips and write a story starter prompt on each one: “I realized I was stuck in a candy store. I decided to…” or, “I was walking through the park and saw children playing a strange game…” Pass the jar back and forth, reading the prompt out loud and using it to tell a story.

How to support your child’s reading skills

Reading, like any learned skill, improves with practice. As children learn to read, frequent decoding helps them improve their fluency and makes them more confident readers. Here are a few ways to help them improve:

• Let your child choose at least some of their own books, including graphic novels and other non-traditional formats. Introduce them to a variety of genres, like nonfiction, poetry, and mystery.
• Introduce a regular reading time into your routine. Encourage your child to explore their books as you read your own. Even 10 to 15 minutes at first can help build their independent reading stamina.
• Invite your child to read text in the environment around them. For example, go on a walk and see how many street signs they can read.
• Whenever you read to your child—or they read to you—ask them questions about what’s happening. For example, invite them to predict and summarize:
  • “What do you think will happen next?” 
  • “How do you think Kev feels right now?”
  • “What was the first thing that happened in this book?”
• Continue reading to your child even after they’ve learned to read on their own.

What are good children’s books for early readers?

When your child is just getting started with reading, they will have the most success with decodable books. These are short books with simple stories and very little text per page. Most of the words in these books only use each letter’s most common sound. There are few—if any—irregular words. 

The earliest decodable books include lots of CVC words—consonant, short vowel, consonant—like pin, hat, and dog. CVC words are the easiest to blend. After repeated readings, your child’s speed, fluency, and confidence will likely increase.

As they become more comfortable with basic blending, you can introduce decodable books with new phonics rules. These books focus primarily on one or two specific letter-sound patterns: short vowel sounds, “final e” words like cane and hope, or vowel teams like the ai in wait and the ue in blue. They also introduce a handful of new irregular words, which can be read by sounding out the decodable part and memorizing the rest. 

Once your child has learned the most common phonics rules and is beginning to read with more fluency and comprehension, you can introduce books with non-controlled text. These are books that aren’t written with specific vocabulary, phonics patterns, or a particular level of difficulty. Any book that isn’t designated as decodable falls under this category. Reading them gives your child access to new vocabulary, more complex stories, and less common phonics rules.

The Reading Skill Set

A phonics-based program that motivates
your child to read through play.

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Inspire an early love of reading with Lovevery Book Bundles

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