Help Your Child Learn to Read: 3 Fun and Simple Ideas for Preschoolers
As parents, we often get excited when our child starts learning the alphabet. It feels like a huge milestone—and it is! But knowing letters by name doesn’t automatically mean your child is ready to read or write with ease once they start school.
🔤 Why Letter Names Aren’t Enough
Learning the alphabet is just the beginning. The real key to reading and writing success is understanding how letters sound and how to blend those sounds together to form words.
🧠💬 Reading and writing is all about sounds—being able to:
🧩 Break words down into individual sounds (segmenting)
🧱 Push sounds together to make words (blending)
If your child is starting school soon—or is already in school but finding reading and writing tricky—there’s a lot you can do at home. Try these three simple and fun literacy activities to build strong reading foundations.
🗣 Attach a Sound to the Letter
When your child spots a letter—on a sign, in a book, or during play—acknowledge it and say the sound it makes.
👧 Child: “That’s an M!”
👩👧 You: “Yes! That letter makes a ‘mmmm’ sound.”
🔊 Focusing on letter sounds instead of names helps your child understand how to decode words when reading.
🌼 Jump Out the Word Beats
This is a great active learning game!
Use chalk to draw fun shapes—🌸 flowers, ⭐ stars, or 🌀 spirals—on the pavement.
Call out a word and help your child “jump out” each beat (syllable), hopping onto a new shape for each one.
Examples:
☂ um-bre-lla (3 beats)
🐯 ti-ger (2 beats)
🚁 hel-i-cop-ter (4 beats)
👣 Learning to break words into parts makes spelling and reading much easier later on.
🚗 Guess the Word – A Game for the Car
Turn car rides into a game of sounds!
Pick an object you can both see, then sound out the word bit by bit:
👩🦱 “I see a s-ig-n.”
👱♂️ “I see a sh-o-p.”
Can your child guess what you’re describing?
🎯 This simple game builds phonemic awareness—a critical skill for early readers.
Reading starts with listening and playing with sounds—not just memorising letters. By building your child’s awareness of sounds in words, you’ll be giving them the real tools they need for reading and writing success.
✨ These small, everyday games can make a big difference—especially when you’re having fun together!
About the writer: Lauren is a speech pathologist who has over 18 years experience working with children and teenagers who present with a range of learning and communication differences. Lauren is passionate about helping others and loves to find simple and creative ways to make learning fun! The blog posts featured on this site are written on behalf of Remindables and is intended for educational purposes only and to provide general information and an understanding on a particular topic. By using this blog site, you must be aware that the information shown is not to be used as a substitute for therapy advice and you should therefore seek the opinion of suitable professionals to assist you. The views expressed here are the author’s views alone and not those of their employer or others, unless clearly stated. ⠀⠀⠀
