What Do Stacking Toys Have to Do With Reading and Spelling?

Recently, I was reminded of how Spring and childhood are so similar—new wonders show up every day.

I had the opportunity to watch my great-nephew while my nephew and his wife were away. As a 15-month-old, everything is new to him. One of my favorite moments was when, after multiple days of trying to stack different shapes (from the cutest hamburger toy) on a post, he finally succeeded.

The big, two-toothed smile on his face said it all!

That’s exactly what learning to read and spell looks like.

At first, nothing quite works. Your child tries, misses, tries again, and it can look messy. They might mix up sounds, leave parts out, and feel unsure.

This is called productive struggle.  It’s the kind of effort where your child is challenged just enough to think, try, adjust, and try again. Not so hard that they shut down—but not so easy that they don’t have to think.

That “almost there” feeling is what strengthens the brain, because behind the scenes something powerful is happening. Each attempt is building a clearer map in their brain—connecting what they say to what they see, hear, and write.

At first, my great-nephew needed my help to position the hole in the center of the shapes over the post so they could move down the post.  Little by little I provided less support and he made adjustments on his own.

Similarly, your child needs to make adjustments by flexing sounds while reading.  If they read the word love with the long o sound like in home, they need to recognize that’s not a word and they will need to try a different sound until the word makes sense in the sentence.  This is an important step in reading proficiency.   

Just like my great-nephew didn’t stack the shapes perfectly the first (or the fiftieth) time, your child won’t read or spell words perfectly right away. But with immediate corrections, each attempt becomes more successful than the last.  Instead of letting mistakes happen unchecked, the correct sound or spelling is given right away.  Then your child repeats the sound, fixes the error immediately, and reads or writes the word again.

The correction must be made every single time because if your child is allowed to misread or misspell words, that’s what will become embedded in long-term memory. The longer the error are allowed to go on, the harder they are to correct.

Additionally, it is not possible to become a proficient reader by reading lists of words out of context.  And this is exactly why the way we practice matters.

In linguistic literacy, progress doesn’t come from separating skills. It comes from integrated activities—where reading, writing, speaking, and understanding all happen together.  Instead of learning one isolated skill at a time, kids are building a flexible system that actually works when they encounter new words.

Your child says the sounds in a word, writes those sounds, and then reads the word—all in one short sequence. They read and write words with the same sound using different spelling patterns or the same spelling representing different sounds.  Then they read text, we discuss it, and then they write a summary sentence.  This mix of activities is called interleaving, which improves long-term retention.

Through this integrated process, something powerful happens:  they learn to spell through reading - not by memorizing the letters in words from weekly spelling lists.

Instead, as your child reads —saying the sounds and seeing how those sounds are represented—their brain stores what those words look like. Each time they read a word accurately, they are building a mental picture of how that word is spelled.

So when they go to write, they aren’t guessing or memorizing—they’re recalling patterns they’ve already experienced through reading.

Over time, with enough of these varied experiences, the brain starts to pick up on patterns naturally and tracks what it sees and hears—what sounds show up together, what patterns repeat, what looks familiar.

Without memorizing rules, kids begin to recognize how words work simply through repeated exposures—this is called  statistical learning. Therefore, not all spelling patterns

need to be taught explicitly.  Your child will begin to self-teach and will be able to read words they’ve never come across before.

This is possible because your child is experiencing a few important things in a tutoring session:

• The right level of challenge (productive struggle)

• A natural mix of skills (interleaving)

• Repeated exposure to patterns (statistical learning)

• Connected reading and spelling (structured linguistic literacy)

So if your child is in that “trying but not quite there yet” stage, that’s OK. Those small, repeated attempts—especially when they’re a little challenging, varied, connected, and grounded in real reading—are exactly what lead to those breakthrough moments.

And when it clicks—you’ll know, because you’ll see the smile.