Native Reading: How to Teach Your Child to Read, Easily and Naturally, Before the Age of Three

Give your child the gift of early, effortless, and lifelong literacy. Teaching your child to be a native reader is a joyful, creative and social experience. The techniques of native reading structure just a small portion of your child's natural play, but with this structure, they do something wonderful: the fundamental similarity of written and spoken language becomes apparent, even obvious, to a child. Reading is transformed into a spontaneous skill that children acquire effortlessly, as toddlers, in the course of their play. The benefits go far beyond simply reading early. When a child learns to read natively, deep neural connections are made between oral language and the written word. Reading is transformed into a less abstract and more natural skill. It becomes natively known, just as the ability to talk is known natively. A native reader has a mother tongue not only in the spoken language, but also, deeply, in the written language.

Timothy D. Kailing was an undergraduate at Earlham College, and received his graduate degree from Princeton University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Based on his scientific studies, he developed the native-reading techniques while raising his two children, first in central Vermont, and now in southwest Michigan, where he also writes, teaches, and continues his research.