Teaching Your Preschooler to Read: 6 Easy Tips You Can Try at Home

If you have heard that the rules around mobile phones and electronic devices in early childhood settings have changed, you are right. If your child attends a childcare centre in NSW, these changes are already in effect.

Here is a plain-English breakdown of what changed, why it happened, and what it means for your family.

Why Did the Laws Change?

The changes were introduced as a child safety measure. In 2025, Australia’s Education Ministers agreed to amend the Education and Care Services National Law to address concerns about the potential for personal devices to be used to capture, store, or transmit images of children in care without authorisation.

The intent is straightforward: children in early learning settings deserve an environment where their privacy and safety are actively protected.

What Changed Nationally

From 27 February 2026, amendments to the national Education and Care Services National Law took effect across Australia. Under these changes, educators and staff who work directly with children are restricted from using personal electronic devices in care settings.

Before this, from 1 September 2025, all early childhood education and care services nationwide were required to have written policies in place addressing the use of digital devices.

What Changed in NSW

NSW moved ahead of the national timeline. The Education and Care Services (Supply, Authorisation and Use of Devices) Order 2025 took effect on 6 November 2025, applying across NSW’s 6,000 or more early learning services, including long day care centres, preschools, and family day care.

Under this order, educators and staff must use service-issued or service-authorised devices rather than their own personal devices when working directly with children.

What Counts as a Personal Device?

The definition is broad. A personal device is any device owned by an individual (not the approved provider) that is capable of capturing, storing, or transmitting an image. This includes:

Mobile phones
Smartwatches
Cameras and tablets
iPads and laptops
Hard drives, USB drives, and memory cards
Wearables such as camera glasses

Who Does the Ban Apply To?

The restrictions apply to anyone working directly with children at a service, including permanent and casual educators, students on placement, volunteers, contractors, and allied health professionals delivering programs on-site.

Parents, carers, and other visitors are not covered by the ban. In NSW, parents and carers remain free to use their personal devices during drop-off, pick-up, centre visits, and events involving their own children. There are also authorised exceptions for essential purposes, including emergencies and health or disability support needs.

What About Screen Time for Children?

These new laws specifically address staff device use, not children’s screen time. Screen time limits for young children are not mandated within childcare regulation at a national level.

The relevant guidance comes from the federal Department of Health and Aged Care’s 24-Hour Movement Guidelines, which recommend no screen time for children under 2 years, and no more than 1 hour per day for children aged 2 to 5 years. These are health guidelines, not regulatory requirements.

What This Means for Your Family

If your child attends a childcare centre in NSW, their service is already required to operate under these rules. Any educator or staff member working directly with your child should not be using a personal device to take photos or videos. Only service-authorised devices should be used for that purpose.

If you have questions about how your centre handles digital devices or image capture, you are well within your rights to ask. Most services will have a written policy in place that covers exactly this.

At Clovel, the safety and wellbeing of every child in our care is at the heart of everything we do. If you would like to know more about how we support your child across our centres, we would love to have that conversation with you.

Dr. Seuss once famously wrote, “You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax all you need is a book!” We all know the value that comes from being able to read, but many parents worry they are unqualified to help their child learn reading skills. Not so! Much of the practice children need to hone their reading skills can (and should!) take place at home without the child even realizing “practice” is taking place.

That’s why we’ve created this list with 6 easy tips for helping you encourage your preschooler to read. We think you’ll find these tips easy to implement, and you might be surprised just how fun learning to read can be!

1. Make your home a print-rich environment.

This means going beyond having plenty of picture books lying around. Subscribe to a couple of child-friendly publications like Ranger Rick, Ladybug, or Highlights, and make sure they are easily accessible for curious eyes.

And don’t be afraid to label household items! Placing name cards around the home will help children associate sounds with letters.

2. Help children get comfortable with letter sounds.

Learning to read is no easy task, and it can be confusing for little learners when they are trying to associate letters with the sound they make. For example, when we say the name for the letter c, it is pronounced “see”, yet most preschoolers first learn to associate the letter with the hard c sound found in the word “cat”.

Rather than teaching them to associate a letter’s name with its sound, try pointing to a letter and asking them what sound it makes. If you’ve labeled items in your home, you can use the labels to help. For example, you could ask your child to name an object like the family car, then point to the first letter on the label and say, “If this is a car, what sound does the first letter make?”

3. Enlist the help of letter magnets.

Letter magnets are great for helping children learn to connect letters with their sounds. Most children will be learning simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words at school, and magnets are an easy way to reinforce the lessons at home. Try writing out the word CAT using magnets and ask your child to sound out the word. Once they sound it out, remove the first letter and replace it with another to create a new word—bat, rat, mat, sat, and so on. Children love making the connection between letters and sounds, and this game will have them feeling like successful readers in no time.

4. Talk to your child.

It sounds so simple but having conversations with your child has a dramatic effect on their own vocabulary. As you engage your child in conversation, he or she learns the art of communicating. Their vocabulary expands as they hear you use different words for the same thing (like “market” for “grocery store” or “joyful” for “happy”). They learn how to create sentences with a beginning, middle, and end, and they learn how to tell a story in the same way. They also learn how to use context clues to figure out what you are talking about when the subject is unfamiliar to them.

Not only will chatting with your child improve their reading skills, but it will also give the two of you some nice bonding time with each other…and that is always a good thing.

5. Sing songs together.

Did you know singing helps with language acquisition? It’s true! And it can also help with reading. Listening to and singing along with children’s songs introduces preschoolers to new words that often repeat…over…and over…and over again until they live rent-free in your head (does anyone remember Baby Shark?). That repetition and/or rhyme makes the words easier for children to learn, so play a variety of music throughout the day.

6. Play with rhyming words

Playing with rhyme is not only fun, but it also facilitates language learning. There is no shortage of children’s books that focus on rhyming words and encourage children to enjoy playing with language (we love Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months by Maurice Sendak and Llama Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdny). Rhyming books also help children develop phonemic awareness—the understanding that individual sounds in words can be manipulated.

It’s important to remember that you are not tasked with teaching your child how to read. Your job is to model just how fun reading can be, so let your child see you enjoying a good book and talking about how much you love reading. And try to make the time you spend reading with your child or listening to music something that is enjoyable and that each of you looks forward to.

With your support, your child will be reading independently in no time!

Thanks for reading,
Clovel Childcare
1300 863 986

Lyn Connolly

Founder and Company Director

Lyn Connolly is the Founder and Company Director of Clovel Childcare & Early Learning Centres, a family‑owned group of eight centres across Western Sydney established from her first service at Merrylands. Active in early childhood education since 1977, she also serves as President of the Australian Childcare Alliance (ACA) NSW, representing providers in state and federal consultations, media, and public hearings.

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