“W-el…c-come. Mmm..my? Welcome? Mi? Welcome, Mi! That’s Daddy!”
My 4-year-old nestled beside me as I swam through the sea of tabs on my laptop. My email tab popped up, and “Welcome, Mi” flashed at the top of the screen. My eyebrows furrowed, wondering why my 4-year-old was calling me by my first name. And where was she welcoming me to? Then I recognized the sounds from our daily letter blending practice.
“Welcome, Mi — wait, Iman, you just read that?”
She beamed a tight-lipped smile up at me. “Yes, dah-yee.”
With a sharp side-eye, I opened up a new document and started typing random words. I thought, I’m going to test her and see if she really can read.
I typed out a few random words I know we haven’t learned yet. Pillow. Final. Notice. Triple. Independent. She read the first four words quickly then began to sound out “independent,” and my jaw sank as I witnessed her brain neuroplasticity in real time as she decoded and computed all the phonemes she knows.
| The science of reading is the systematic study of how the brain learns reading, writing, and language. It draws from various fields within psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy and has been a field of study for about 50 years. It includes phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. |
She still has trouble pronouncing the double “d” in “daddy.”
How is this toddler reading? Well, it’s not because her mom and I are geniuses. We just followed the research. In one of my obsessive research rabbit holes on early childhood development, I was listening to a literacy webinar when I came across Spencer Russell, the former teacher behind Toddlers Can Read, which teaches parents how to teach reading to their young children. I learned quick and very easy exercises I did with my toddler the next day, and I was surprised at how quickly her phonics skills budded.
I thought Russell was a bit intense in his demonstrative Instagram videos with kids. With a mini dry erase board in one hand, using a marker as a pointer in the other hand, Russell sits adjacent to his student, rarely, if ever, breaking eye contact, sternly supporting the toddler through a blending exercise using the letters S-A-T. I was impressed at how he captures the attention of the most wiggly toddlers to willingly listen long enough to begin to identify letter sounds and eventually blend them. As a new parent and toddler basketball coach (you read that right), that was a skill I hadn’t yet mastered.
As a researcher, it seems like a no-brainer to do what research says. But being a researcher also makes me a critical optimist — some might say a skeptic — for better or worse. In this case, the research on the science of reading is pretty consistent. That might be because there isn’t too much dissent about how our brains process information, although there are some debates among researchers, but it’s fairly straightforward to apply what we know about how our brains learn language and reading. We started prioritizing sound identification over letter identification, making the lessons shorter and at a more consistent time of day, building rapport by rewarding microbehaviors, and coming up with fun games to, as we say, “get the wiggles out.”
Iman is my oldest of three, and her mom and I did all the first-time parent things. We applied all the developmental psychology research studies Google Scholar suggested — obsessed over how much screen time she should not have (impossible to avoid), interviewed at every preschool possible (chose none), and only bought educational toys to avoid overstimulation (still happened anyway). And she was born in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, so I even made her a droplet protective sunhat with silky fabric sewn into the cap to protect her hair. It wasn’t until babies number two and three came that we eased up on the obsessiveness over what feels existential. That includes early learning.
To be clear, lots of research on academic achievement points to early foundational skill building as a strong predictor of later success, but it’s not the only predictor. We decided to allow her to listen to those poorly developed phonics songs she loves and just shout the correct “/ks/” sound for “x.” We try to intertwine learning with what Iman already enjoys, like watching cooking shows or building magnetic block towers, without the projected anxieties about her future.
We’re well on our way with reading and writing — now, it’s time to ramp up math.
