Please note Don Potter’s favorite approach: Blend Phonics
Nobody stays at the pronunciation of letters for more than a few months. You quickly move to blends. Two-letter blends and then three-letter blends.
Once you blend, for example, F plus L plus 0 to create a new sound—flo— you no longer deal with the letters or sound them out. So a long word like “flotation” is very simple. Three common blends, and you’re done.
A word like that would almost never be mastered by a sight-word reader.
In fact one of the jokes about sight-word readers is that all long words starting with V, for example, become basically the same word. Victory, victims, Virgin, vigilant, vigilante, violent, virulent, vigorous, virtuous, virtual, Viceroy, vitamin, and many more. The poor soul has to plug in all these words until one of them seems to make sense.
Hmmmm .... learn a hundred or so sounds and blends or hundreds of thousands of words by sight? The choice seems clear to me. Young tots quickly learn the sounds different animals make and they can quickly learn the sounds different letters make. I sang my kids (and now my grandkids) an alphabet song,”A says a [long a] or ah,B says buh, C says kuh or sss, etc., and from having learned the sounds the letters make, it’s as small jump to sounding out words.