Learning to Read Can Be a Playful Journey
(This is part of a series of articles where look at how to approach learning playfully.)
The other day, we noticed an impressive volume at the top of the learning-to-read category on the Amazon (USA) store. This book is a whopping 40 years old, and a look at the reviews will have your mouse hovering over the Buy Now button. Relieved parents have left five-star reviews, testifying to how effective the book is. They admit that the 100 abstract exercises were boring, repetitive, and took forever, but no matter—at the end of this arduous journey, their child can now read.
That’s how it’s supposed to be, right? Children wrestle to learn to read, and it’s all part of the rite of passage called education. And, the sooner they get used to the tedium and struggle and unreasonably difficult hard work, the better.
We disagree.
There must be a better way, especially in the year 2024. We have miraculous inventions like eerily intelligent AI and transformational apps like Khan Academy and Duolingo. We even have sliced bread. Surely there must be a better way to teach reading?
And there is. It’s called play.
The Cracks in the Current System
The most common (correct) way to teach reading consists of direct instruction with phonics. It gets many things right, for which we applaud it.
But it misses a beat on several aspects that could make it truly phenomenal:
Autonomy—the freedom to decide how to do something.
Meaning—the real-world context that makes things less abstract and more concrete.
Joy—something that is vastly undervalued in traditional education.
And the latest neuroscience tells us these play a crucual role in learning! Sai discusses this in his book Journey of the Mind.
How does an experience look when it’s stripped of these three qualities?
Imagine you’re climbing a mountain with a guide. He’s ahead of you and helps you to know where to go, as he should, right? But this guide is really weird. You stop for a moment to admire a flower; he tells you to move it. You turn around for a moment to gaze at a breathtaking view, and he tells you that’s not what you’re here for. He even corrects your posture and way of walking! In the process, he takes away your right to make decisions—your autonomy and freedom. His rushed perfectionism and focus on achieving the perfect climb rob you of the beauty and enjoyment of the journey. To him, the journey is about the pace and efficiency of the climb. To you, it was supposed to be about the love of adventure, exploration, and beauty.
Learning to read is your child’s first educational mountain, and it won’t be their last. Life is nothing if not an exhilarating mountain range that beckons us. And that leaves us asking: what kind of guide do we want to be on our children’s first-ever climb?
Mechanics vs Meaning
Direct instruction methods strip meaning away from language to the point that it’s all about rules. Say you’re trying to teach the “a” sound. You may give your child a list of words, such as flag, man, and dragon. But stripped of context, these words become dry and abstract. Your child’s mountain starts looking like the image below, where the challenge they must conquer is a list of letters, sounds, and rules. When the process of learning to read is focused on phonics only, learning to read becomes a chore.
What if we can turn it into a playful process? What if we could keep the underlying mechanics but overlay them with autonomy, meaning, and joy? What if we could make a child’s mountain, instead, look like this?
While you are still acting as the guide, you can allow reading to remain enjoyable and leave them free to explore. Can they still learn the “a” sound from above by using a setting with richer meaning? Yes! If you flip the switch of your imagination, it’s plain to see that the boy must get to the flag at the top of the mountain to save the princess. In all likelihood, he’s meeting an odd little man on the way, who tells him how to fight the dragon.
A playful approach refuses to strip learning to read of its natural beauty and enjoyment, and here, mechanics don’t drown out the journey. Children are wired to learn through play. It makes no sense to go against the grain. Keeping things playful builds strong foundations and keeps them motivated to carry on.
…But Play for Reading? HOW?
Learning to read is so abstract and full of rules! So how do you go about doing it playfully? Here are our best tips.
Let your child pick a book every day and read with them. Allow words to have meaning—to conjure up delightful worlds. You can guide them as you read, showing them how the building blocks of the words are glued together.
Remember what kind of guide you want to be. A fixation on phonics, rules, and pace of learning will make the process unpleasant for both of you. Give them back their autonomy. Let them lead and linger on the things that catch their interest. If your lesson is about “a” and they get distracted by the “b” and “t” sounds in the word “bat”... that’s okay. Your child is learning other sounds on their own, and you should be happy about that!
Trust your child and trust natural learning processes. As adults, we tend to want to structure and control, measure and assess everything. So what do you do if you’ve decided on a playdough activity for shaping the letter b, and your child is making boats and bananas with the playdough? Just let them be! Yes, you need to guide them, but meander around the learning curve, and don’t be so focused on what you think you must be doing.
Foundations are important; take your time. Don’t focus on speed. Often, it looks like nothing is happening, but there’s a whole lot of invisible development under the surface. Remove the pressure to hit certain milestones at a certain pace. Rushing them may make things feel faster in the short run, but you’ll be building a shaky foundation for the future.
When you can marry the excellence of phonics and existing tools with a rich and powerful connection to the real world—and give your children the freedom to explore that, reading comes alive. And that’s a mountain worth climbing.
PS: If you are looking for more details on how to help with the phonics and decoding when reading along, we have put together a high-level reading primer and a more practical how-to guide.
You might want to explore Giffie, an app we built to enable a playful approach to learning to read. It is available on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.