Which Children Learn to Read Easily?

I read at 3, with no instruction. My sister at 2. How did we do it? We were not hyperlexic. We read with comprehension and would read Enid Blyton for hours.

My son had not been interested and was due to start school. He needed a kick-start, and within a week he was self-teaching. How does this happen?

Ironically, if we are to eradicate illiteracy and prevent any child from struggling to learn to read and spell, we need to focus on what the children who don’t struggle do. Not wait for children to fail and then take action, but instead try to emulate what those children did from the start, with ease. I’ll show you how to give every child the opportunity to self-teach themselves to read and spell before starting school, and show teachers what to add to their daily routines to prevent the dyslexia paradox.

Emma Hartnell-Baker MEd SEN "The Word Mapper"
The Neurodivergent Reading Whisperer®

To prevent the wait to fail cycle and avoid the Dyslexia Paradox, parents and teachers need to understand which children learn to read with ease, with little to no instruction.

What conditions are in place for those children to facilitate Word Mapping Mastery®?

Can we put those conditions in place for all children in the early years?
Training is included in the Speedie Word Mapping Membership

Do you know how sme children teach themselves to read?

Which children learn to read and spell easily?

Children learn to read easily when they can quickly reach the self-teaching phase of word learning, where each successful attempt to map between speech sounds and print strengthens their internal knowledge of written words. At this point, reading and spelling begin to develop through use, through implicit learning.

1) They can use word mapping as a self-teaching mechanism

The self-teaching hypothesis proposes that most new written words are learned independently through successful encounters with print. When a child can accurately map the speech sounds of a word onto its written form, that experience leaves behind detailed information about the word’s pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. Children who learn to read easily are those for whom this word mapping process works reliably in both directions, from print to speech and from speech to print.

2) Their phoneme representations are stable enough to support mapping

Self-teaching depends on having clear and stable phoneme representations. Children who can consistently identify the speech sounds in words are better able to align those sounds with graphemes. This stability supports accurate word mapping and allows orthographic representations to accumulate over time.

3) They understand bi-directional word mapping with minimal effort

Children who learn to read easily tend to form efficient links between graphemes and phonemes in both directions. Because these links are readily available, cognitive resources can be used for confirming word identity and meaning, rather than for working out the mapping itself. This increases the likelihood that a mapping attempt will succeed and contribute to self-teaching.

4) The words they map already exist in their spoken language

Word mapping is most effective when children are working with words they already know orally. Strong vocabulary and oral language knowledge allow children to recognise a word once the mapping is close enough, providing confirmation that strengthens the stored orthographic representation.

5) Most early mapping attempts are successful

Children who learn to read easily experience a high proportion of successful word mapping attempts. Each success strengthens future mappings, creating a cumulative advantage. When mapping attempts frequently fail, self-teaching is disrupted and progress slows, even when instruction is present.

6) They use partial decoding to refine word knowledge, not rote memorisation

Children who identify a word from context and then actively recode it, by attending to the letters and sounds that confirm the word, continue to build detailed speech–print mappings. This process supports self-teaching because the written form is analysed and stored, rather than bypassed. In contrast, when words are recognised only through guessing or memorised as unanalysed wholes, opportunities for strengthening word structure are lost. Children who learn to read easily use repeated, increasingly accurate word mapping experiences to make the internal structure of written words transparent over time.

When children are shown which letters function as graphemes and their sound values, and use a consistent routine to bond speech sounds, spelling, and meaning in the orthographic lexicon, they experience what children who learn to read without instruction intuitively understand.

From birth until school:

Use Duck Hands®
Speak in speech sounds
Teach the Speech Sound Monster Sounds
Have Mapped Words® everywhere (print from Map and Drag)
- call the graphemes pictures of sounds ie 'Speech Sound Pics®'
Use the phrase "Follow the Monster Sounds to say the word"
Use the Monster Spelling® Piano app with Monsters toggled
Type words in Phonemies using MySpeekie®
Teach the Spelling Routine when ready.
Start One, Two, Three and Away! when ready.

One, Two, Three and Away1 Available Online Here