I taught both my daughters to read before they went to school. It was fun and gave them a head start.

By the time my elder daughter, Joanna, was three I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep her amused. She soon grew bored with toys but loved to be read to. I used to buy Ladybird books, which were very cheap at the time (I was living on a low budget) and we joined the local public library. Many of the Ladybird books simply had a picture of an object on one page with the word in lower case printed on the page opposite. Joanna particularly liked these books and very quickly seemed to know what was coming next before I turned the page. I then began to notice that if I covered up the picture she would sometimes recognise the word without it. This made me wonder.

I did a bit of reading and discovered that very young children often have photographic memories. They can also learn to read by recognising the shape of the whole word long before they can grasp the concept of separate letters of the alphabet. I decided to put this to the test.

One day I announced a new game. We were going to make small cardboard labels from an old cereal packet using a black felt tip pen to write on the words of the things we were going to label. The first time we made just four labels for things in the living room….rug, door, chair, and cat,

We both then went round the room and placed the labels on the things in question after looking at the word very carefully and trying to remember it.

Next I asked Joanna to collect all the labels and put them in a hat and shake them up.

Now came the hard bit. She had to pick out the labels one at a time and go and put it on the correct object. We practised with these labels until she got them all right several times. I was surprised how quickly she picked it up. I gave her lots of encouragement and there was a mystery treat at the end.

Over the next couple of weeks we added more labels and roamed around the whole house. I let Joanna decide what she wanted to label and pretty soon we had around fifty labels which she could place accurately.

It was around this time that I managed to get Joanna a part time place at our local nursery school. She absolutely loved going there. One afternoon when I went to collect her, the nursery teacher took me to one side and said “Did you know that Joanna can read?” I told her that she could read some words and was learning fast. “No”, she said, “I don’t mean just the odd word. This afternoon I found her in the library corner reading a story book to some of the other children. She wasn’t pretending to read it; she was actually reading it fluently!”

I was amazed at this. In the end, Joanna turned out to be a particularly intelligent child, so I thought maybe this was why she’d picked up reading so quickly.

My second daughter, Kate, was born when Joanna was eight years old. When she was three I decided to try to teach her to read in the same way. I was more than pleased to discover that she also picked it up using the same method, although it took her a little longer before she was able to read a book by herself. Nonetheless, she did this well before starting school.

Both my daughters have done well academically, and I like to think that I gave them a head start by teaching them to read and appreciate books at a very early age.