Is your four- or five-year-old ready to read?

At four years old, and even at five years old, most children cannot put a hand over the top of their heads and touch the opposite ear.  This was an old-fashioned way to decide whether a child was ready to read.

But even so, some children are ready to learn to read at four and five.  What are some of the signs?

• The child can hear and reproduce sounds and words well.
• The child shows curiosity about letters and words.
• The child likes rhymes.
• The child wants to know how to write his or her name.
• The child has a big vocabulary and eagerly adds more words.
• The child likes being read to.
• The child studies picture books for meaning.
• The child can sit still for 10 or 15 minutes at a time.
• The child has a long attention span for his age.

Even with all these qualities, some four- and five-year-olds are not ready to read.  If you start to do sound-letter work, and he bores of it or pushes it away, back off.  But keep reading to him, and asking him to do oral work—describing what he sees in pictures, inferring what the pictures mean, predicting what will happen next, and asking him to identify the main ideas.

Eventually he will want to know more.  By six-years-old, usually kindergarten-aged, a child should be learning to read.  But even then some children balk.  In some European countries reading isn’t taught until a child turns seven, at which time the process generally goes much more quickly than at four- or five-years-old.