My, our, daughter turned 7-years-old the end of November. We homeschool. I believe the foundation for learning begins with learning to love God, and to love family, and to particularly love learning (natural to some, not to others) … I believe it right to light their fires for learning whether it’s easier or harder, for once the fire is lit, it burns. It can be extinguished, but that’s why we keep our children with us until they are old enough to set free to fly.
So then comes the learning, the little things toddlers and young children learn come in daily life. Reading is the most important thing for them to learn after all the above things. This is a big step, reading. Phonics is said to be the right method to teach English, but other information exists to say differently. Various methods have been employed by the educational forces in America, to limit this discussion to the U.S.
Vertical Phonics is a good method, is said to be what EVERY person can use to learn to read English. I have a system in this method, but I can definitely say it’s too intensive and just doen’t really work for a VSL child UNLESS they already can read 
Reading English is more intuitive for some folks I think, as it is for me. I learned to read in my early years and was always in the uppercrust of reading levels and groups in elementary school. I had phonics of this and that sort from first to second grades, I was in three different schools for those two grades. I can recall when I couldn’t read. I can’t recall “learning to read” though. I mostly can recall my before-school years as trying to “read cursive” and I couldn’t, and I made a bunch of loops on paper once and said that “I was writing”. I do think I must have had some sort of ABC foundation in print at that time, 4 or so years old. I went to kindergarten at 5 years of age, and there we didn’t do much with “writing” as far as I know, more play and coloring and such (as is right for a youngster anyhow, IMO, though I don’t agree with sending youngsters off “to school”)
In first grade we had Dot and Jim books (which I began to collect recently, from the 50′s through 60′s, I was in 1st grade in 72/73 but haven’t found editions for those years, just 1969 and previous.) which are “phonetic keys to reading” and all that goes into that is more than phonetic, the materials are workbooks for the children, and the teacher has more resource, pictures cards, word cards, sentence strips, etc. I don’t have all the pieces to be able to see what’s what with the beginning of the program, and what I have I haven’t sat down with to pour out an understanding of it from this side of my education, overall the most standout feature of the series is how the pictures change through the version printings … the Political Correctness transformation is eye-popping to me.
So in any case I see English without phonetic rules. I have tried a few methods with our eldest, now 9. He was “ready to start” official reading for a long while and I learned fast that what I naturally had done was right for us, for him, and that the few “programs” I slightly tried were not going to work easily and were NOT worth the effort.
At 9 Russell is reading whatever I give him. He’s read nearly all his Dad’s old Hardy Boys books. He’s read many early readers and beyond. He’s currently reading The Two Towers, having finished The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring first. He reads Young Adult books of a non-mature content quite easily. He speeds through material. That’s self-reading. Aloud reading is a totally different skill and I don’t push that to be fluent, only early aloud reading is helpful to determine that a child is actually able to read a page and understand what they are reading (you can see a lightbulb turned on in their head/eyes.) When a child is in their teens or when ready, aloud reading can become a grand skill to hone.
