(1) You learn to read by the Phonics method. McGuffey, for instance.
(2)After you master that and read a few hundred real books, you are then a sight reader.
The Ed Gurus merely tried to get the children to sight reading faster by eliminating phonics. You know what? In highly literate households where kids pick up reading on their own when they are 3 or 4, it sometimes works.
It does not work all that well for your ordinary happy-go-lucky 6-year old male first grader. I tutor maths at the Community College and these youngsters, while perfectly "nice" people are astoundingly illiterate and have absolutely none of the Western Canon under control at age 20 or so. Nada. Zip. Nuthin'. Can you spell, "Obama Voter?" Forever.
PS: If I see one more tattoo, or piercing, just send the cops to pick me up before I hurt someone. WTF? Over.
“(2)After you master that and read a few hundred real books, you are then a sight reader. “
That’s the other part of the equation. After my niece learned how to read, we gave her a ton of books. She reads every night before she goes to sleep. When I was over to babysit, I gave her the Book of Esther and she read the entire book before it was time to turn off the lights.
I learned sight reading in first grade (they didn’t offer kindergarten at the public school) and was qualified to read any book in the library by the time I started third grade.
It all depends on the style of learning that a child has. You have to be a visual learner to learn sight reading. My family are all visual learners and not very good auditory learners.
When my grandson was 18 months old, he could read every word in his vocabulary and some words that were not in his vocabulary, like chimpanzee.
When I was in college, I was in an advanced English comp class for students that scored above 650 on their English boards. The teacher told us that we were all sight readers and that studies showed that because we were sight readers we were also very fast readers, but we were also the worst spellers. We had spelling lessons in Eng. Comp, that the lower classes did not have.