7 Creative Ways to Teach a Toddler to Love Reading

How do you teach a toddler to love reading? Here are 7 inspiring tips you can try today.

My 5 year old reads at 3rd grade level and consumes 20 plus books in a day. If she had it her way, she’d be reading even more than that.

In fact, by bed time I literally have to tell her to STOP reading and go to sleep.

I really don’t say that as a way to boast.

Yes, I’m definitely proud of her and super thrilled that she loves reading. But it’s important for anyone reading this to realize that every child learns to read at a different age and it’s OKAY.

It’s not a competition.

Also, reading is definitely not something that you can force upon your child. Your job as a parent/teacher is to sow the seeds of love for reading deep into your child’s heart. Once you do that, THEY will be the ones chasing you, asking for new books to read and begging for more trips to the library.

So in this blog post, I’d like to share with you everything that I did with my child that helped in making reading fun (and how YOU as a parent can do it too!).

Note: this is not a post about how to teach your child to read. If you’re interested, you can read about the exact steps I took to teach my child to read fluently by the age of 3. Rather, it’s about how you can take simple, tiny little steps to ensure that your child grows up to be an avid reader.

It doesn’t matter if your child is in preschool, kindergarten, first grade or a struggling reader. These are tips you can easily implement to help make reading fun.

This Post is All About How to Teach a Toddler to Love Reading

Teach a Toddler to Love Reading

#1. Read to your child every day

This might sound obvious but it’s literally the most fundamental step in ensuring that your child grows up to love reading.

Don’t just limit reading books to before bed time. Keep some board books in your diaper bag along with snacks and read away to your little one whenever you can – on a bus, in the park, sitting at a Cafe sipping some late.

I started reading to my child as early as 4 months. As she grew older, she learnt to hold the book in her hand, excitedly turn the pages and point at the pictures in the book.

By reading to your child, you’re creating an experience for them. Even if they’re tiny babies and have no idea what you’re saying, they’re learning TONS by listening to you read aloud.

Research shows that reading aloud to babies has numerous benefits including: building a strong relationship with your little one, enhancing brain development, improving their listening skills, enhancing their memory and building a rich vocabulary.

#2. Discuss the story book with them

When you read a story book with your child it’s important to discuss the story with them. Use simple enough language that they can understand. Also, keep it brief and engaging. Your little one will soon understand that the book is telling a story.

Discussing the story with your child has IMMENSE benefits: it increases their vocabulary tremendously, improves speech and and enhances their comprehension.

Best of all, it gives you and your little one a great opportunity to bond, explore new stories and discover new concepts.

# 3. Use finger pointing

Be sure to point to the words on the book as you read. This helps your child build print awareness.

Print awareness is understanding that print is organized in a particular way — for example, knowing that print is read from left to right and top to bottom. It is knowing that words consist of letters and that spaces appear between words.
ReadING ROCKETS

This sounds like a simple tip (and it is!) but once I started implementing this technique I noticed it had a great impact on my then 18 month old. She quickly grasped the basic concept that the story her mom was telling her corelated with the words on the page.

# 4. Make reading time the best part of your child’s day

When your child hears the word reading, he should associate it with warmth, love and cuddles.

Create a cozy environment whenever you’re reading to your little one. Put away your phone. Be present. Let them snuggle up in your lap. Hold them tight. Add a fuzzy blanket to the mix to create the cozy ambiance. Use an animated tone and silly expressions to truly make story time into an experience.

The idea is to create the fondest of memories for your child, where he associates reading with all that is good. These small things go a BIG way in shaping your child’s association with the activity of reading.

# 5. Frequently take them to the library

Start taking your child to the library from a young age. Many local libraries have fun activities for toddlers like circle time and read aloud story time.

A library can be a magical place for a child; frequent library trips can be one of the best ways to instill a love of reading in your little one.

And there is absolutely no need to fret if your child gets a little loud or starts running around all over the place. A children’s library is meant for children. No one expects them to quietly sit in a corner and read like an adult.

Let them explore the vast array of story book collections and pick out their favorites. Once they’re old enough, make them a separate library card; it makes them feel all grown up and extra careful about taking care of the books they’ve borrowed for taking home.

# 6. Set up a reading corner/ reading nook

This had a big role to play in getting my girl into the habit of reading.

Once a child has a designated spot in the house that has their story books neatly kept away and a cozy place nearby they can sit, they’re more likely to head to their ‘reading nook’ and bury their nose in a book.

Designing an ideal reading corner isn’t hard and doesn’t require much effort or space to set up.

Here’s what you’d need:

1. A quite, tiny little corner of the house that doesn’t get too much traffic

2. A good quality book shelf

3. A cozy little place where your little one can sit and read. This could be a cutesie beanbag, a comfy toddler chair or simply a fuzzy kids rug with some cushions.

4. A reading lamp. This is to ensure that your child’s eyes don’t get strained. It also helps create the perfect reading ambiance.

And there you go. In 4 easy steps you can set up a cute reading corner that will make your toddler fall in love with reading.

#7 Make Reading Fun With Reading Activities

You want your kids to excel at reading? The quickest and easiest way is to make reading fun for them. It should never feel like a chore!

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.

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Teach a toddler to love reading – the DONTS

Now that we’ve talked about ways to instill a love for reading in your child, it’s also important to talk about things you should NOT be doing. These are all those things that will put your child off reading and may even hamper their learning.

Mistake #1 Pressurizing your child to read

The worst thing you can do as a parent is to force your child to read.

This includes asking your child to do anything related to reading that they clearly have no interest in doing. This could be pressuring them to sit in your lap and listen to a story when they’d much rather be off playing, forcing them to continue listening to a story when it’s clear that they are no longer interested and pushing them to demonstrate other reading readiness skills.

The important thing to acknowledge is that each child develops reading readiness skills at different ages. Your job is not to shove those skills down their throat. Rather, your job is to create an innate love and interest in reading.

Mistake #2 Teaching your child sight words

Sight words are high frequency words such as ‘She’ ‘The’ ‘Are’ which make up a large chunk of the English language.

Many reading methods start off by asking children to memorize sight words. This is the WRONG way to teach a child to read and numerous studies prove that this can leave a damaging impact on your child’s ability to read.

The correct methodology is to teach children phenomes. These are the sounds that each letter makes eg B makes the sound /buhh/) and then teaching them how sounds can be blended together to make up a word. For example the sounds /buhh/ /aaa/ /t/ makes up the word BAT.

This method is backed by research and it works. It’s what I used to teach my 3 year old and I saw phenomenal results! You can read more about that here.

Mistake #3 Teaching toddlers the letter names before sounds

Many parents start teaching their kids to read by introducing them to the letter name. They sing the ABC song and are super pleased when their kids can name all the alphabets.

What many many parents don’t know is that learning the names of the alphabets is a very poor tool in aiding a child to learn reading.

And that what’s much more important is to teach them the letter SOUND. This is the phonics based approach to teaching reading. And it forms a critical base upon which your child learns to de code words by sounding them out and then blending to form a word.

Mistake #4 Over emphasizing phonics and ignoring comprehension

While phonics is critical to teaching your child to read, it’s important to do so while inculcating reading comprehension side by side.

This means that while you’re focusing on teaching kids to sound out words, they should also be understanding what’s happening in the story.

One way to improve your child’s comprehension is to finish reading a page and then ask them questions about what’s happening. “Why do you think the rabbit is sad?” “Why did the wolf run away?”

Mistake #5 Forgetting your goal

Sometimes as parents we get so caught up in the ‘I need to teach my child to read’ craze that we forget the whole POINT.

You goal is not to have your child reading before your friend’s kid so you can feel better about yourself. You also don’t want your kids to learn reading quickly so their teacher can heap praise on them and you can get a nice ego boost.

And you definitely don’t want your child to learn reading but have no interest in independently reading for pleasure.

What you DO want is to inculcate a deep love of reading in your child’s heart. And for them to become lifelong readers. It’s very important to keep this goal in mind as that will heavily influence your attitude towards teaching reading.

Interested in teaching your child to read and have no clue where to begin?

If you’re like me, you want to start teaching your kids to read but you have absolutely no idea how to begin. I stumbled across Children Learning Reading completely by accident and I was so glad I did.

Children Learning Reading is a phonics based method of teaching little ones to read, perfectly crafted for the 2-6 year old age group. It’s what I used for my 3 year old and I saw some incredibly impressive results.

And I’m not alone. You can see the raving reviews from thousands of other parents who couldn’t believe how quickly their kids learned to read!