Developmental milestones for early reading
After introducing hundreds of kids to reading, some as young as 2, here’s what we’ve learned about developmental milestones at very young ages. Anecdotally, we see large variance even within individual families, so my guess is that these likely reflect minimum ages and there’s a much longer tail in the general population.
If you’re planning to teach your kid to read super early, these are the major developmental milestones you need to be aware of:
12 months: Developing phonemic awareness
At this age, kids are still learning to recognize and differentiate the sounds of the spoken language, although it will be several more years until they learn to make some of the most difficult sounds (like “th” and “r”). This is the ideal age to introduce our free Alphabet Sounds book.
24 months: Ability to associate letters with sounds
Some kids can start learning letter-sound pairings surprisingly early. “This funny-shaped line makes the sound aaa” is not that different from “this funny-shaped animal makes the sound moo”.
Critically, kids are not yet ready to learn to read at this point, as they are still unable to blend sounds together into words.
36-48 months: Ability to understand left-to-right reading order
In English, words on a line are always read from left-to-right, and the letters in a word are always read from left-to-right. Not only that, but “b” differs from “d” only by the direction it faces. Directionality is important for learning to read! You can’t teach a kid to read if they aren’t yet developmentally capable of telling the difference between “am” and “ma”.
36-48 months: Ability to blend individual letter sounds together into a word
Instead of reading “man” as “m…(pause)…a…(pause)…n”, kids need to be able to sound it out as “mmmaaaannn” and then recognize that as a word they know.
“Ability to blend sounds” is the critical developmental milestone required to begin learning to read. It’s hard to tell whether a child has hit this milestone yet, which is why at Mentava we use left-to-right reading order as a proxy. Generally, we want toddlers to be able to tell the difference between 🐶🐟 (dogfish) and 🐟🐶 (fishdog) before trying to teach them to read.
48 months: Orthographic mapping
This is the process by which the brain begins to store an entire word as a single unit so that it doesn’t have to be sounded out every single time. While we haven’t found any definitive research on the topic, our observational sense is that this ability to perform orthographic mapping is an even later developmental milestone.
In other words, if you have an extremely early reader pushing the edges of their developmental abilities, don’t be surprised if they continue sounding out every word for an extended period of time. Don’t worry, fluency will develop with age and practice!
