How did you kids learn to read?

Mine started learning while watching tv and playing video games. I'm sure reading to them helped a bit too. In kindergarten they used a blend chart and some other new process. It worked cause they both read.

We start before school. Learning letters, than putting them with sounds and then turning that into a word. Usually they teach a combination of sight words and phonics.

I sat with them & read every day and showed them words and how to sound them out etc..

Most public schools use a variety of ways to teach reading. Yes, they do use phonics. But they also use some sight words. These words have been complied into a list known as the Dolch word list. There are many other methods as well that not only include phonics, but linguistics as well.

It starts with learning letter sounds and then moving on to sounding out words. Some is pure recognition at first, for words like "who" and "know" that they can't really sound out right away.

Once they had basic letter sounds down, we did flash cards with kindergarten sight words, and we would add several each week. Then we moved on to learning some of the rules like "kn" is a "n" sound, "when two vowels go a'walking, the first one does the talking" (like in "rain" or "Sue"), and "an e on the end makes the first vowel say its name" (kite, Nate, time), blends, etc...then it was on to higher grade level sight words, but by that point she was doing quite a bit of reading and figuring it out for herself through practice.

Workshop Way and reading for 30 minutes/day.

A combination of sight words and phonics. 'Letter sounds' being first and sight words being added later.

My oldest literally taught herself how to read by remembering what words meant, when she asked what they meant.

My youngest is only 2.

site words

They use a TON of sight words. I don't ever remember having sight words when I was a kid. They also use a combination of other methods. We have used the blend technique with my DD who is almost 4. She is reading at an early Kindergarten level and truly started reading 3 weeks ago.