Good or Bad?
This was a conversation started in another thread and I didn't want to hijack the tread by continuing the debate there.

I think teaching kids to read is a great tool in communication. We talk about the words, the pictures, they get practice saying new words, they learn new vocabulary, and they have fun doing it.

Kids younger than 5 can learn to read by sight but cannot learn to read by phonetics. The sight reading does not reduce their ability to learn phonetics. If done right children taught to read by sight will naturally develop the decoding skills used in phonetics.

I use flash cards with my kids. I have just the word on one side and a picture and the word of the other side. We speed through both sides. They are given time to look at them and handle them. I have them all laminated so they will hold up. They love doing them and have learned to read many of the words. I look at it as a step above labeling everything which I also do. I also view it as a step up from books that label pictures with a one to one correspondence. Both of these latter techniques have been used to teach reading for years.

I don't use any of the electronic based supplements but have begun to make books to correspond with the words and give them more exposure to the words as well as exposure to seeing them in sentences.

I'm just wondering others' takes on this type of program.

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