Learn to Read, Step by Step

The 6 stages

Listening and rhyme (age 2-4) — Hears rhymes, claps the beats in a word, and notices that words start with sounds.
Letters and their sounds (age 3-5) — Knows the letters by sight and by sound, capital and small.
First and last sounds (age 4-5) — Hears the first and the last sound in a word.
Blending three sounds (age 4-6) — Blends three sounds into a word: c-a-t, cat.
sh, ch, th and magic e (age 5-6) — Reads sh, ch, th and the magic e, and knows the common tricky words by sight.
Sentences (age 5-6) — Reads and builds a short sentence, and writes their own name.

Ticks are saved only in this browser — there is no account, and nothing is sent anywhere. Play on a different phone and the ladder starts empty; that is the price of not tracking your child.

Why the order matters

Reading is not one skill. It is a stack: hearing sounds in spoken words, knowing which letter makes which sound, blending sounds into a word, then recognising words fast enough to think about what a sentence means. Each layer sits on the one below, and most children who find reading hard at six are missing a lower layer rather than the top one. That is why this page puts the games in order, and why the first stage has no letters in it at all.

The ladder follows systematic phonics

The six stages follow the same progression as the UK's Letters and Sounds phases and the order used in most structured phonics programmes: listening first (Phase 1), then letter sounds (Phase 2), then hearing sounds at the start and end of words, then blending consonant-vowel-consonant words, then digraphs like sh and ch and the split "magic e" (Phases 3 to 5), and finally sentences. India's NIPUN Bharat goals for the foundational stage expect the same sequence in English, a little later.

Say the sound, not the name

The single most useful thing a parent can do: when you point at a letter, say its sound ("mmm"), not its name ("em"). Letter names are for spelling, later. A child who knows that m says "mmm" and a says "a" and t says "t" can read "mat"; a child who knows "em, ay, tee" cannot.

How fast should we go?

Slowly. A stage can take three months, and that is normal. Move up when the games in a stage feel easy and a little boring, not when a birthday arrives. If a stage is a struggle, the answer is nearly always to go back one stage and play there for another fortnight — not to push on. Ten minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday, and a bedtime story every night is worth more than all of it.

The ages are a guide, not a deadline

Finland, which has some of the best readers in the world, does not begin formal reading until seven. A four-year-old who is happily on stage two is exactly where they should be. The ages on each stage show when most children are ready for it, not when it must be finished.

Now do it for real

When the screen goes off, do something with your hands. Try 🌺 Flowers that open in water — an easy craft for ages 4-6, with every step read aloud in your language. You will need paper, colours, a bowl of water; nothing that needs a trip to a shop.

There are 56 more on the things to do at home page, and free printable worksheets if you would rather have something on paper. Ten minutes on a screen and twenty minutes off it is a good shape for a day at this age.