The key to learning how to read is to...read. I think the turning point for me was a teacher I had in the 4th grade. Instead of forcing the class to all read the same thing, she let us read anything from the school library or what we brought from home.
Made all the difference. Instead of reading as a chore, as part of school, I found myself reading for fun. Sure, I initially chose to read Hardy Boys novels and MAD magazine, but quickly progressed from there to science fiction, non-fiction and then even literature so when I got into the later grades, I had usually already read what was being assigned to the class.
I remember when I learned to enjoy reading, and it was whn we were assigned “The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury. What an exciting thing to open up cpmpletely new worlds in your imagination? I then went week after week to the school library until I had read every Bradbury book they had...”R is for Rocket” “S is for Space” “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, all of them. After Bradbury I moved on to Asimov, Niven, and Heinlein and never looked back.
Kudos to the teacher who exposed me to science fiction.
I attended a Catholic school. We had alphabet letters with lower case and caps all the way around the room. Also had pictures, A is for apple, B is for banana etc. It was painless learning. Every afternoon the nun would read to us, usually from some children’s storybook...it made us want to read our own storybooks. It was joy to learn in that atmosphere. No stress, just enthusiasm and a desire to learn faster and read more. And so very simple.
Works like a champ. For a few years I was a reading tutor at a Middle Grade school helping laggards come up to grade level. We had some books in the room but we told the kids they could bring in any other book they were interested in. Quite a few brought in those by Goosebumps. They came up to speed pretty fast.
What a valid point: let kids read what interests them, what they enjoy, and they will pick up reading as a pleasant thing to be pursued, not something mandatory, to be dropped at the earliest possible time in their lives.
My daughter started with the “Babysitters Club” series in 2nd grade. Once she’d read the first book, she went thru the others in record time, because she was actually interested. My sons took to The Hobbit. Whatever it takes. Now, in their late 20s, they all are voracious readers.