5 Toddler Pre-Reading Skills and How to Inculcate Them

5 toddler pre-reading skills every parent should know about.

As parents to little ones, we want to do all we can to ensure that our child has a solid learning foundation. And reading is one of THE most fundamental, lifelong skills our kids will need in their journey of learning.

However many parents in their eagerness to see their child read, completely ignore or skip over the toddler pre-reading skills.

These are skills a child must develop BEFORE they can begin learning to read. They form the basic foundation and stepping stone upon which your child’s reading skills are based.

And I’ll be honest: when I first started on this whole ‘I should teach my child to read journey’ (I’m calling it journey because that’s what it was… I learned SO much along the way!) I literally didn’t know any of this stuff.

I still thought that teaching a child to read began with the whole ABC song followed by waving sight word flashcards in front of my child so she could memorize them. (hint: totally wrong way to teach reading!)

I often get questions about how I managed to teach my 2.5 year old reading. Most people are simply astounded (if you’re interested, you can read more about that over here).

Here in this blog I’ve put together the 5 toddler pre-reading skills you should know about and how you can easily inculcate them in your little one.

It doesn’t matter if your child is in preschool, kindergarten or first grade. It’s suuuuper important to make sure they’ve mastered these skills before they start learning to read. Many struggling readers are struggling precisely because they are being taught reading without having first learnt these basics.

5 TODDLER PRE-READING SKILLS AND HOW TO INCULCATE THEM

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Pre-reading skill 1: Print motivation

Print motivation is your child showing an interest and desire to read. Simply put, it’s your child showing excitement and love for story books.

What toddlers can do:

Pick up a book and pretend to read

Excitedly point at pictures in the book

Cuddle up contentedly in your lap and attentively listen to a story

Point at words on billboards, shop posters etc and try to make out what it says

What YOU can do:

Read to your child starting at a young age (reading to babies has immense benefits!)

Have a routine of reading to your child every day

Make reading time the best part of the day; snuggle up tight with your little one and create a relaxing reading ambiance

Set up a reading corner (you can read my post on how to set up a perfect toddler reading corner in 5 easy steps)

Trips to the library. A library can be a magical place for a child and the birthplace for their love for books!

Point out print to your child where ever you are: on a billboard, a poster, a menu card at a restaurant. It will help them understand that print is all around them and it will build their curiosity and desire to de code the words

Pre-reading skill 2: language skills and vocabulary

Before starting to read, it’s important that a child has developed strong language skills. He should be able to use a variety of words to explain ideas and concepts.

What toddlers can do:

Answer basic questions about a story

Re tell a story using their own words

What YOU can do:

Build your child’s vocabulary by frequently telling stories. These are some of the best selling books for toddlers on Amazon:
The Gruffalo
If Animals Kissed Good Night
Dear Zoo: A Lift-the-Flap Book
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Have engaging conversations with your little one using a wide vocabulary and clear enunciation; when it’s a word they don’t know, be sure to explain the meaning using simple language they can understand

Point at objects and teach them their names

Read books that have repetition in them

Ask open ended questions when reading to your child

Read the same book to your child again and again. Its something kids love, it helps build their vocabulary and research shows that it also builds pattern recognition and increases their confidence with reading

Pre-reading skill 3: Print awareness

Print awareness is your child understanding that the words on a storybook correlate with the words being spoken while reading.

It’s kids understanding that the words on a page have a purpose. Print awareness also includes your child knowing how to hold a story book correctly, turning the pages and knowing that you read from left to right.

What your toddler can do:

Hold a story book correctly

Turn pages in the right order

Know that we read from up to down and left to right

What YOU can do:

Demonstrate how to hold book properly

Using your finger to slide under the words as you read to help them correlate the story you’re reading with the words on the page

Let your child hold the book and flip the pages as you read

Pre-reading skill 4: phonological awareness

Phenomes are the individual sounds that the letter makes. For example the letter A makes the sound /aaaa/.

Phonological awareness is simply your child knowing that a word is made up of different sounds.

What toddlers can do:

Blend sounds together

Rhyme

Know that a word is made up of different sounds

Replace a letter sound with another to make a new word (eg if you replace P in the word PAT with R then you end up with RAT

What YOU can do:

Play blending games with your child

Reading rhyming books

Playing substitution games

Pre-reading skill 5: a desire to read

Lastly, but definitely most important on the list is: inculcating a DESIRE to read in your child. You can do this very very easily by making reading into something that is fun.

When teaching my 2 year old to read, I’d make the whole thing into a game. We’d do so many fun reading activities together – she would always be begging if we could play more!

If something is fun, your kids will want to do it more and more. And that repetition is exactly what will help them achieve reading fluency.

I’ve put together some really fun and engaging reading activities that your little one will LOVE DOING! They cover the fundamentals of reading like beginning sounds, CVC words and word families etc and are simple enough for a 2-3 year old to do easily. They also incorporate super fun elements like matching, cutting and pasting, coloring and tracing.

Get your free download!

Also, here are some superb games on Amazon that make reading super fun for little kids.

ThinkFun Zingo Sight Words Award Winning Early Reading Game for Pre-K to 2nd Grade

TREND ENTERPRISES: Sight Words Level 1 Bingo Game

The Fidget Game Learn to Read in Weeks Master 220 High-Frequency Dolch Sight Words

Once a child develops these 5 pre-reading skills, they’ve built a solid foundation for reading.

They are now ready to start properly learning how to read!

Trying to teach your child how to read and feel totally clueless?

When my daughter was two and a half, teaching her to read was the last thing on my mind. Like most toddler parents, I was much too preoccupied with challenges like potty training and managing tantrums.

I stumbled upon Children Learning Reading totally by accident.

I watched in jaw drop amazement video s of kids as kids as young as 2 sounding out words and reading full sentences.

I was so honestly so skeptical about trying it out. My first thought was that my child was way too young to start. My second thought was that it would take too much effort and time and I didn’t have either to spare.

I put aside these limiting thoughts and instead thought: what do I have to lose?

And so I started. I spent 10 minutes a day and much to my amazement, within a few weeks of using Children Lear ning Reading my child was reading 3 letter words! She soon progressed to reading sentences and then little short stories.

I can not begin to describe the joy you feel when you see your little one confidently finish reading a story by themselves from beginning to end!

She’s 5 now, reads at 3rd grade level and I literally need to ask her to come out of her reading corner!

If you’re interested, you can read my detailed post on how I taught my child to read: what are the things that worked for us, what I learned from the whole process of teaching my child to read and what I’d recommend you to do.

Check out Children Learning Reading and see why 70,000 plus parents have used this reading program (with zero teaching experience) to see some incredible results!

Oh and don’t forget to grab your free reading activities and printables by signing up below!