Can't I just let the schools teach my child to read?
Can you risk it? Many children attend the first grade and realize they are behind their classmates. They feel inferior and a pattern of falling behind emerges.
Teachers can easily tell which children were taught at home. They love to teach smart children.
My wife and I used The Family Readers to teach our daughter how to read. She later scored 8 times higher than average on her first reading placement test. Now I'm amazed at how easily she can read new words by phonetically sounding them out--which convinced me that the phonics approach to teaching reading really works.
