Your four year old holds the book upside down and reads it to you perfectly. Every word, every pause, the funny voice on the last page.
She cannot read a single letter on that page. She has heard the story forty times and she remembers it.
Parents sometimes feel caught out by this, as though they have been fooled. They have not. That child is doing something important. She has worked out that the marks on the page carry the story, that pages turn in one direction, and that books are worth her time. All of that comes before letters, and children who skip it find reading much harder later.
Here is what helps, age by age.
You are not teaching reading yet. You are building the appetite for it.
Read the same book again. Then again. Repetition bores adults and delights small children, and the boredom is yours to absorb.
Let your child turn the pages, even badly. Let them interrupt. Let them name the dog on every single page.
Point at pictures and ask what is happening rather than what things are called. "Why is he hiding?" does far more than "what colour is the car?"
Keep the session short. Six minutes of a child leaning into you beats twenty minutes of a child wriggling away.
In KG1 your child starts meeting letters properly, usually through sounds rather than names. This is the year the two of you can do real work together, and it takes almost no time.
Say the sound, not the letter name. The sound of the letter in "mmmm" helps a child read "mat". The name "em" does not.
Hunt for letters outside the house. Lift buttons, number plates, the sign at the clinic, the cereal box. Children love spotting their own initial and will do it fifty times.
Write their name together, slowly, badly. The first attempts look nothing like writing. That is the point.
Expect the letters to come out of order and backwards. Nearly every four year old writes some letters in mirror image for a while.
KG2 and the start of Grade 1 are the hardest stretch, and nobody warns parents about it.
Up to now reading has been a pleasant thing that happens to your child. Now your child has to do it, out loud, slowly, in front of you, and it is effortful. Some children find this exciting. Many find it dull and frustrating.
Three things help more than anything else.
Keep reading aloud to them. Parents often stop once a child can read a few words, exactly when the child most needs to remember that books are fun. Do both. They read a page, you read five.
Wait longer than feels comfortable. When your child stalls on a word, count to five in your head before helping. Most children get there in four.
Praise the attempt, not the result. "You worked that one out" lands better than "good girl". One describes something she did. The other describes her.
Something happens around Grade 1 and Grade 2 that catches families out. The child can read, so the reading at home stops.
School reading continues, homework continues, and the ten minutes on the sofa quietly disappears. Then in Grade 4 a parent notices their child never picks up a book.
Protect the habit while it is cheap to protect. Ten minutes, same time each day, no screens in the room. Let them choose the book even when the choice is a comic, a football annual or the same dinosaur encyclopedia for the eleventh week.
A child who reads rubbish willingly becomes a reader. A child who reads excellent books unwillingly usually does not.
Most families at our school speak another language at home, often two. Parents worry that this holds their child back in English. It generally does not, and the worry leads to a mistake worth avoiding.
Do not switch to broken English at home for your child's benefit. Your child learns language from rich, fluent, confident speech, and that is the speech you have in your own language. Thin English at home gives them less, not more.
So read in whichever language you read well. A parent reading fluently in Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, Tagalog or Arabic is teaching story, rhythm, vocabulary and attention. All of that transfers.
Then let the school carry the English reading, and support it with the small things: the ten minutes, the library visit, the letter hunt in the car park.
If you want to read in English and feel unsure, pick books below your child's level rather than above it. Nobody is marking you.
Flashcards before interest. A child who finds books dull will not be rescued by drilling.
Correcting every mistake. Let small errors go. Stop only when the meaning breaks.
Comparing with a cousin or a classmate. Children reach reading at genuinely different times, and the gap at five tells you almost nothing about the gap at nine.
Reading as a punishment or a condition. "No tablet until you read" makes the book the obstacle and the screen the prize.
Giving up on the ten minutes because the week went badly. Four days out of seven is a habit. Nobody manages seven.
When should my child start reading?
Most children begin putting sounds together into words between four and six. The range is wide and normal.
How long should we read at home?
Ten minutes a day, consistently, does more than an hour at the weekend.
Should I use phonics at home?
Say letter sounds rather than letter names, and ask your child's teacher which sounds the class has covered so far. Working ahead of the class rarely helps.
My child refuses to read. What now?
Go back to reading aloud to them for a few weeks and take the pressure off. Refusal is almost always about difficulty or boredom, not about character.
Does watching cartoons in English help?
A little, for vocabulary. It does not build the skill of decoding words on a page, which is the part that needs practice.
If you are not sure where your child is or what to try next, the early years team is the right person to ask, and the answer usually takes two minutes.
You are also welcome to come and look at our early years library, see what children at your child's stage are reading, and take something home. Our school life page shows how the early years day is put together, and our guide to the CBSE curriculum in Abu Dhabi sets out what the early years cover.
Bring your child. They will choose better than you will.
Written by Bright Riders School Abu Dhabi. Last updated 19-10-2026
