I have been teaching my oldest son to read with Anki and techniques recommended here on LessWrong as well as in Larry Sanger's post, and it's going great! I thought I'd pay it forward a bit by talking about the techniques I've been using.

Anki and songs for letter names and sounds

When he was a little under 2, he started learning letters from the alphabet song. We worked on learning the names and sounds of letters using the ABC song, plus the Letter Sounds song linked by Reading Bear. He loved the Letter Sounds song, so we listened to / watched that a lot; Reading Bear has some other resources that other kids might like better for learning letter names and sounds as well.

Around this age, we also got magnet letters for the fridge and encouraged him to play with them, praised him greatly if he named [...]

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Outline:

(00:22) Anki and songs for letter names and sounds

(04:02) Anki + Reading Bear word list for words

(08:08) Decodable sentences and books for learning to read

(13:06) Incentives

(16:02) Reflections so far

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 19th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8kSGbaHTn2xph5Trw/teaching-my-toddler-to-read

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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