Reading program for 2 year olds

How to Teach a 2-Year-Old to Read Successfully?

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Can 2-year-olds learn to read? How to teach a 2-year-old to read? I’m happy to share with you, my personal experience of teaching my own toddler son to read.

Before I had my son, I was not one to imagine teaching my own future child to read one day. Reading to him, yes. But teaching him to read? That thought never struck me.

Instead, I did think of sending my child to a phonics class in the future to help him learn reading. Because that was what I saw my sister did with her two daughters.

Shortly after I had my baby, for the first time I came across an advertisement promoting a baby reading program. I was sold and I bought the rather expensive program. I was so looking forward to the day that my baby could read.

That never happened.

After 4 months of lessons, I didn’t see any signs of my baby reading. So I stopped his lessons and shelved the baby reading program. I didn’t want to continue having him sit on my lap and look at words flashed across the computer screen on a daily basis.

But later on, when he was older, I was introduced to a children’s reading program which I began to use on my child, Kaden when he was 2 years and 3 months old. The highly effective Children Learning Reading program was developed by a father, Jim Yang who successfully taught his own children to read as toddlers.

I’ve personally experienced success in using this program in teaching my child to read. Without this program, maybe I might still be on the path of sending my son to a phonics enrichment class when he turned 4 or 5 years old and these lessons could easily cost a lot more.

If you want to teach your 2-year-old child to read, I have a few tips to share with you.

1. Read to Your Toddler

Regardless of how young your child is, read to him regularly. It’s a great bonding time for both of you. It also introduces him to the world of printed text and lets him associate stories with the text in the books.

As he grows older, consistently use your index finger to point beneath each word that you read. It lets him know that we read from left to right, and also sounds are connected with words.

2. Assess Your Toddler’s Readiness to Read

If she is ready, start her on her reading lessons. Remember children at this age learn best through fun and play. Keep the lessons fun and also short to cater to their short attention span.

If your child doesn’t seem interested at this stage, try again in a few months’ time. The intention is to get her interested in learning to read, not to put her off the idea of learning. She might be ready maybe 2 or 4 months later. It’s okay.

3. Start Lessons When Your Toddler is Speaking More Clearly

Usually, kids start to speak more clearly around 2.5 years old, so you might like to start his reading lessons then.

But your child’s speech development could be more advanced, and you can start earlier if you deem he is ready.

My son’s speech was not advanced. At 2 years and 3 months old, he was speaking more words, but not in sentences yet. He could speak rather clearly, though. Around that time, I also noticed his intellectual ability was developing quickly. So I decided to start him on the Children Learning Reading program.

Right below, you can watch a very short video clip of my son reading from a page of a book. Please pardon the background grilling noise. I captured this when he was about 2 years and 9 months old, a few months after we had started him on the reading program.

4. Help Your Toddler to Develop Phonemic Awareness

As I mentioned earlier, my two nieces attended enrichment phonic classes. So I thought I would do the same for my son when he was about 4 or 5 years old. I had a vague idea that learning phonics would help a child learn to read.

What I didn’t know then was that I could be helping my toddler to develop phonemic awareness first before he even starts to learn to read.

Phonemic awareness is the skill of identifying the smallest units of letter sounds. This skill would go towards helping him to progress well with a phonics and phonemic awareness-based reading program in the future.

So when my toddler was 17 months old, I focused more on helping him develop his phonemic awareness skills through listening to phonics songs, singing to him phonics songs, and letting him play with phonic toys.

While my son was having fun playing, he was also picking up phonemic awareness skill.

You could also slow down certain words in your daily conversation with your child. For example, “Do you want more b-r-ea-d?” “Would you like to d-r-in-k water?” Let your child understand that words are made up of letter sounds. This would take repetition and consistency.

5. Choose a Phonics and Phonemic Awareness Based Reading Program

There are many baby reading programs that teach babies to read through using the whole word method. Hundreds or thousands of words and pictures are flashed before the young child. Through repetition, over time the child will be memorizing and recognizing these word shapes.

However, I prefer a phonics and phonemic awareness-based reading program where the toddler is taught to sound out letters, decode words, and blend letter sounds to pronounce words.

This way, the child will be more successful in sounding out unfamiliar words on her own in the future. Studies have also shown that phonemic awareness instruction programs are more successful in producing fluent readers.

2-year-olds children can certainly learn to read when there’s a nurturing, patient, and loving adult who will take the time to teach, using a simple, step-by-step, and effective toddler reading program. You can check out the highly effective Children Learning Reading program that I used to teach my son to read.

If you have any questions or comments about what I’ve just shared, simply leave them here and I’ll get back to you soon!

6 Best Programs for Teaching Children to Read

One of the earliest ways we educate our young children is by teaching them how to read. Reading is the most fundamental area of education. Teaching a child to read will set them up for a lifetime of learning. Many of us don’t feel fully equipped to handle such an important task, however, and can use all the resources we can get! If you are a parent looking to help your child learn to read, these six programs are some of the best (and most successful) you can use.

1. Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons

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Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons is a complete, step-by-step program showing parents how to teach their children to read. It’s a sensible, easy-to-follow, and enjoyable way to help your child gain the essential skills of reading. This program contains one hundred lessons. It is fully illustrated and color-coded for clarity. Twenty minutes a day will give your child the basic and more advanced skills needed to become a good reader.

2. Reading Eggs

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Reading Eggs is an online program that makes learning to read fun, interactive, and highly rewarding. It is intended for ages 2–13. Reading Eggs was created by a highly experienced team of elementary school teachers, writers, and developers to help children become fluent and proficient readers. The multi-award-winning early learning resource supports your child’s reading journey with carefully designed online reading games and activities that are easy to follow, self-paced, and highly engaging for young learners.

3. Teach Your Monster to Read

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Teach Your Monster to Read is an award-winning series of online games that’s helped millions of children learn to read. The game is for children in the first stages of learning to read or for older children who need a bit more practice. Teach Your Monster to Read takes children on a magical journey, meeting colorful characters along the way, and collecting fantastic rewards. As they progress, they rehearse a range of essential reading skills, including matching letters to sounds, blending, and segmenting. They’ll also learn tricky words and to read full sentences. The game runs on any standard laptop or desktop computer (including Apple Macs), and the app works on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Kindle tablets.

4. The Reading Lesson

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The Reading Lesson is a bestselling program that teaches young children to read in 20 easy lessons. It is designed as a step-by-step course for parents who want to teach their young children to read at home. The teaching method is based on phonics and word recognition. With its innovative and guided approach, the lessons provide an easy-to-follow recipe for teaching children to read. This program has also been used successfully for children with disabilities.

5. Bob Books

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Bob Books is a true first-reader series. It is designed to make helping your child learn to read simple and straightforward. The clean layout, short words, and simple phonics make learning to read a fun and natural step for a child that knows the alphabet. Bob Books was designed to give young children the tools to go from learning letters to reading words. The beginning reader book sets start slowly. They progress from books with three-letter words to books with more than one sentence per page.

6. Phonics Pathways

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Phonics Pathways is a best-selling book that teaches reading using sounds and spelling patterns. These sounds and patterns are introduced one at a time and slowly built into words, syllables, phrases, and sentences. Simple step-by-step directions begin every lesson. Additionally, wise and humorous proverbs encourage virtues such as patience, perseverance, honesty, kindness, compassion, courage, and loyalty.

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List of books to read at 2-3 years old - Best books for children 2-3 years old - Kids Russian Books , understand the plot, express their opinion about what they heard and saw. It's time to start more serious and meaningful reading!

How to read?

• Turn reading into a pleasant ritual for your baby. For example, do it before bed, after breakfast, or before nap. The environment plays a big role - beautiful pillows, a soft blanket, favorite toys, a beautiful lamp create a feeling of comfort, safety, tranquility and enhance the pleasant reading experience.
• Read the same work many times if the child asks for it. Such a request indicates that this particular book resonated in the soul of the baby. Use repeated reading to develop imagination and creativity - ask your child to continue a sentence or come up with their own ending to a familiar fairy tale.
• Do not be afraid to take on texts with words that you think are unfamiliar to the child. Children understand the meaning of many words in fairy tales and poems intuitively, from the context. The more new words are found in the text, the more intensively the child's vocabulary will expand.

What to read?

• Kind and instructive folk tales
• Author's tales of the classics of children's literature
• Poems and fairy tales in verse
• Poetic riddles
• Stories about nature and animals

Which books to choose?

• Editions with simple, well-executed illustrations that match the text on each page.
• Works with concise and meaningful text, a limited number of characters and a simple storyline.
• Timeless books. Focus on your own memories, think about what works you remember from childhood.
• Durable and not too expensive books for you - children at 2-3 years old do not yet realize how easy it is to damage a book.

When choosing folk tales, give preference to good stories, because children at this age are very impressionable and can be frightened if the tale is scary.

Turnip, Hen Ryaba, Gingerbread man, Teremok, Zayushkina hut, Fear has big eyes, Masha and the bear, Three bears, Cockerel and bean seed, Bull tar barrel, Geese-swans, Fox and crane, Hare-brag, By pike command, Fox and black grouse, Tops and roots, Chanterelle-sister and wolf, Chanterelle with a rolling pin, Winged, hairy and oily, Cockerel - Golden comb, Mitten, Bubble, Straw and Lapot, Cockerel and hen, Winter hut of animals, Dereza goat, Two greedy bear cubs, Three little pigs, Grandmother, granddaughter, and hen, Wolf and goat, Like a dog looking for a friend, Tiny havroshechka, Visiting the sun, Princess frog.

Fairy tales by Russian authors

At the age of 2-3 it is still too early to read fairy tales about magic, princes and princesses, fabulous creatures and unknown lands. The best choice for children of this age are fairy tales in verse and short classic fairy tales with a linear plot and simple characters - people or animals. In addition to the classics of children's literature and European storytellers, whose works have been retold to children for more than one hundred years, it is also worth paying attention to the fairy tales of children's foreign authors of the 20th century, translated into dozens of languages. High-quality modern editions of foreign books help out parents who ask themselves the question “What else to read?” When Russian children's classics have already been read to holes, and instill in children a good taste and interest in reading.

• Korney Chukovsky - Tsokotuha Fly, Cockroach, Phone, Moidodyr, Stolen Sun, Aibolit, Fedorino Gora, Barmaley, Confusion, Chicken.
• Vladimir Suteev - Under the Mushroom, Apple, Chicken and Duckling, Three Kittens, Terem-Teremok, Different Wheels, Rooster and Paints, Magic Wand, Mouse and Pencil, Sack of Apples, Who Said Meow?, Fisherman Cat, Boat, About a hippopotamus who was afraid of vaccinations.
• Grigory Oster - A kitten named Woof, Some trouble, It's easier to go down, Where is it better to be afraid?, The middle of a sausage, It's not fair, A well-hidden cutlet, I'm not at home, Echo, The shadow understands everything, Secret language, Let's get acquainted, Pif's adventures .
• Gennady Tsyferov - An elephant cub lived in the world, Chu-Chu the train, How to become big, Who is kinder to whom, How the donkey bathed, Pies, Stupid frog, Diary of a bear cub, Live motorcycle, How frogs drank tea, When there are not enough toys, Mishka's pipe , You have to think, Clouds, Cloud milk, Lonely donkey, Train from Romashkovo, Steamboat, Cockerel and the sun, About an elephant and a bear cub, Scarecrow, Sweet house.
• Mikhail Plyatskovsky - Barefoot on a leather walk, A bug that wanted to become big, A long neck, A hedgehog that can be stroked, Buzzard, Green frog and yellow water lily, Like two foxes shared a hole, Like a donkey Alphabet learned to respect elders, Like a duckling Kryachik lost his shadow, Colorful animals, The sun as a keepsake.
• Boris Zakhoder – Why the fish are silent, Piglet on the tree, Teddy Bear, Little Mermaid.
• Vladimir Dal - Girl Snow Maiden, About a mouse-hole, Crane and heron, Cancer outsmarted the fox, Fox-bastfoot, Fox and Hare, Fox and Bear, Picky.
• Vitaliy Bianki - Fox and mouse, How Fox outwitted Hedgehog, Teremok, Sly Fox and Clever Duck, First hunt, Terenty-Teterev, Fox and mouse, Arishka-coward, Tails.
• Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak - Gray Neck, The Tale of Komar Komarovich, The Tale of the Goat, The Tale of the Brave Hare, The Parable of Milk, Oatmeal and the Gray Cat Murka, The Tale of How the Last Fly Lived, The Tale of Sparrow Vorobeich , Ersh Ershovich and cheerful chimney sweep Yasha.
• Sergey Mikhalkov – Why mice don't offend cats, I want to butt heads, Greedy hare, Mirror, Magic word, Portrait, What the cat imagined about herself.
• Ekaterina Karganova – Like a chicken looking for a voice, Chunya, Little mouse's song, Let there be a "croak", Who is the most beautiful?
• Emma Moszkowska – Someone else's carrot, Gopher, who wanted to be like a man, Who is the kindest, I can also buy such a suitcase, The chicken went to Kud-Kudaki.
• Vladimir Stepanov - Road to the Mill, Miller and the Bear, Freckles, Silver Key, Penguin and Flower, Horseshoes, Rooster and Robbers.
• Sofia Prokofieva – The Tale of the Ill-mannered Mouse, Masha and Oika, The Tale of the Shoes.
• Leo Tolstoy - About a city mouse and a field mouse, Lipunyushka, A calf on ice, Oak and hazel, Mice, a wolf and a goat, How a man divided geese, Two comrades, A mouse, a rooster and a cat, Already and a hedgehog.
• Boris Zhitkov - Brave duckling, Mug under the Christmas tree, Flower, Soap, Evening.
• Vsevolod Garshin - Frog Traveler
• Valentina Oseeva - Talkers, What a day?, Kind hostess.
• Valentin Berestov – Honest caterpillar, braggart snake, How to find a path, Stork and nightingale.
• Alexander Vvedensky - Meow.
• Natalia Dilaktorskaya – Adventures of the Gray Malamysh.
• Isaac Kipnis - A kitten that forgot how to ask for food.
• Konstantin Ushinsky – Know how to wait, Wind and sun, As it comes around, it will respond, Goats and a wolf, A rogue cat, Two goats.
• Galina Lebedeva - How Masha quarreled with a pillow, How Masha nursed the crows, About a snowman.
• Valentin Kataev - A pipe and a jug, a gingerbread house, a seven-flower flower.
• Yuri Yakovlev - Umka.

• Hans Christian Andersen - Thumbelina, The Ugly Duckling, The Princess and the Pea.
• Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm - Bremen town musicians, Wolf and seven kids, Friendship of a cat and a mouse, A pot of porridge, Brownies.
• Charles Perrault - Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty.
• Alf Preussen - About a kid who could count to ten, Merry New Year.
• Lilian Muur - Little Raccoon and the one who sits in the pond
• Judith Kerr - The tiger who came for tea, Meowli. Stories from the life of an amazing cat.
• Enid Blyton – Famous Duck Tim
• Sven Nurdqvist – Four Secrets of Findus, Where is Petson?, Come on, Petson!, Findus moves in, The story of how Findus got lost when he was little, Christmas in Petson's house, Petson is sad, Petson goes camping.
• Georg Johansson – Machines, Machines work, Mulle Mek and Buffa, How Mulle Mek and Buffa became friends, Mulle Mek assembles a car, Mulle Mek builds a house, Mulle Mek builds a boat, Mulle Mek makes an airplane, Mulle Mek in the workshop, Winter story.
• Gunilla Ingves - Bruno the Bear series.
• Michel Gay - Zebron Zu series.
• Rotrout Susanne Berner - series "Karlchen, father, mother and grandmother Nickel".
• Gabriel Vincent – Ernest and Celestine series.
• Nick Butterworth - Watchman Willie series.
• Mark Welthuis - Frog Kwak series.
• Lars Klinting - Castor Beaver series.
• Lina Zhutaute – Tosya Bosya series.
• Steve Smallman - Duck porridge.
• Beatrix Potter - Uhti-Tukhti.
• Karol Roth – Bedtime Stories
• Elizabeth Shaw
• Octav Panku-Yash – Big news about a little boy.
• Hans Fischer - Ember Kitten, Lisetta's grandmother's house.
• Eva Wieden - Sasha plays with cars.
• Erwin Moser – Shustrik and Tishka, New Adventures of Shustrik and Tishka.
• Sheridan Cave - Where to put the hare.
• Roger Duvoisien - Stupid Goose, Petunia Christmas, Donkey.
• Karin Norup – The story of how Benjamin saved Anastasia, The story of how Anastasia saved Benjamin.
• Alexandre Lacroix - Dragons, father and son.
• Benedict Blathaway - Red Engine series.
• Jörg Mülle – Two for me, one for you.
• Natalie Darzhan - Girlfriend Turkey.
• Frederic Star - Doctor Myshkin's ambulance.