Welcome to Cantastic Authorpalooza, featuring posts by and about great Canadian children’s book creators! Today’s guests: Rowena Rae and Elspeth Rae. Take it away, Rowena and Elspeth!
Do you remember when you couldn’t read and figured out a story by looking at the pictures? Do you remember when you noticed the chicken scratch on book pages, and when the scratchings turned into letters and then words?
Learning to read is a rite of passage. Achieving this skill lets a child decipher a code that only bigger kids and grownups seem to know, and it opens a door to new worlds of fantasy, adventure, cultures, and ideas. Many people don’t remember actively learning to read, but some do. Learning to read doesn’t come easily to every child, and for some it can be especially tough. Having a bad experience with trying to learn to read can demoralize a child and make it even tougher to grow to be a confident reader.
Parents and caregivers play a critical role in helping their children access the world of reading, and their involvement is especially important for a child who’s finding the going tough. While writing the Meg and Greg series of decodable books for emerging young readers, we’ve gathered a list of dos and don’ts. Here we share these tips to guide you in helping your child prepare for reading and stay the course once on the path to reading with confidence.
If your child is younger than age 5
Help lay the foundation for their reading journey:
- Don’t worry if your child isn’t yet interested in the letters on the page. Pushing your child to recognize printed letters before they’re ready will likely lead to frustration. There are other ways you can prepare them for learning to read—see below!
- Don’t be intimidated by other parents who proudly tell you their three-year-old already knows the alphabet or their five-year-old is already reading independently. As above, wait until a child shows interest.
- Do instill a love of books as early as possible. Reading isn’t just about knowing letters and sounding out words. It’s about knowing how books work. Start at page one, read from the top left to the bottom of each page, and then turn to the next page. This all seems obvious, but children who haven’t had stories read to them don’t have these skills.
- Do play with spoken words. Sing nursery rhymes together and read rhyming poems and stories aloud. Make silly mistakes and let your child correct you: “Time for zunch.” “Not zunch, lunch!” This kind of word play develops your child’s phonological awareness, a strong indicator of success with learning to read.
- Do sing the alphabet song, and help your child learn that each letter is separate. Many kids start school thinking that “el-em-en-oh-pee” is one letter! Also talk about the sounds of the letters, not just their names. So the letter “a” says /ah/ and “b” says /buh/ and so on. Make a game of calling out the names of objects that start with a certain sound.
If your child is starting to read
Help their journey go smoothly:
- Don’t criticize the reading material. Let your child read what interests them. Graphic novels, world record books, comics… They all involve reading.
- Do select material at the correct reading level. Your child should be able to read at least 90 percent of the words on each page. If they can’t, then the book is probably too difficult.
- Do choose a relaxed time of day to ask your child to practise reading aloud to you. Bedtime, first thing in the morning, or just after school gets out—anytime is fine, as long as it isn’t a time of high stress or distraction in your family. Put your phone away and concentrate 100 percent on your child’s reading.
- Do continue to read harder material aloud to your child to model fluent reading and expose them to vocabulary and ideas more advanced than they can read themselves. Keep reading aloud to them into their teenage years!
If your child has lost confidence or is really struggling
Help to reset their reading experience:
- Don’t get frustrated if your child can’t recognize a word, even if they encountered it a few moments before. To begin with, for some children, it’s like meeting a whole new word each time. Figuring out what a word says is called “decoding.”
- Don’t worry if your child can’t decode every word on the page. It’s fine to prompt them or tell them a word. Doing so helps the flow of reading and keeps the experience from becoming too laborious or demoralizing.
- Don’t be surprised if your child gets stuck on small words. Sometimes the short and seemingly simple words (like “the” and “of”) present more of a challenge for struggling readers than some of the multisyllabic words.
- Don’t put your child on the spot and make them read aloud in front of other kids or adults. This will only increase anxiety and possibly shame them.
- Don’t compare your child to siblings or classmates. Emphasize that everyone has their strengths and their struggles. They’re just different for each person.
- Do be patient! Children start by having to decode or figure out every single word. It takes children hundreds, sometimes thousands, of exposures to letters and common letter sequences to start to recognize them automatically. This mental process is called orthographic mapping.
- Do encourage your child to re-read the same things again and again to build confidence and fluency.
- Do find materials that your child can be successful with. If your child is very resistant to reading, try choosing a book that’s lower than their reading level so they find success and practise their reading fluency. Gradually introduce more difficult material.
- Do make reading time a safe and reassuring experience. Find a peaceful, private space. Bring a treat to share.
- Do help your child when they get stuck on a word. Assess the word yourself: Can your child decode (sound out) the word with the letter-sounds they’ve learned so far? If yes, gently prompt them and help them blend the sounds together. If the word has sounds they don’t yet know or has an unusual spelling (like “enough” or “friend”), just tell them the word and move on.
- Do share the load with your child. You can take the pressure off by sharing the reading with them. This can happen at any level: read one sentence each, or one page each, or one chapter each. Some books, including our Meg and Greg series, are designed specifically for shared reading with different levels of text—one for the child and one for the adult.
- Do look for external help, if things really aren’t going well. Your child doesn’t need to be diagnosed with a specific language-learning difficulty to benefit from some extra help. Sometimes it’s also better for children to work with a teacher or tutor who isn’t their parent.
As well as being supportive and positive for your child, one of the best things you can do is to model reading. Make sure your child sees you reading for pleasure, and have books of all reading levels in your home. When you let reading be an enjoyable part of everyday life in your family, you help your child develop positive associations with reading. Support your local bookstore and max out your library card, and then find a comfy spot to sit with your learning reader and dive into reading together.
Sisters Rowena Rae and Elspeth Rae write the Meg and Greg decodable story books, published by Orca Book Publishers, for ages 6–9. The stories in each book are designed for shared reading between a child learning to read and an experienced buddy reader. The seventh book, Moose on the Loose, hits shelves on February 17, 2026. Find out more at megandgregbooks.com.
