My older sister brought home one of those charts that show the different letters of the alphabet and how they sound in different words. She was in first grade and I was in kindergarten.
We copied those charts over and over, with drawings and crayons. One day someone gave us an old window shade, which made it possible to do a spectacular letter chart that looked just like the ones in school. Wow!
By the time I got to first grade I could read. The teacher caught me reading at the back of the book and said something like “You can’t read that yet. Go back to the page we are on.” Of course I said “Yes I can.” The result was that she she trotted me into the second-grade classroom and I could their book too, and then the third-grade book.
I’m not posting this to show off, because it was not me who did it. It was the people who gave beginning readers phonics, rather than making them memorize each word individually.
My mother taught all six of us to read before kindergarten, using phonics. I still remember reading the entire reader on the first day of second grade and thinking, “Now what?”
Well said. My Dad taught me to read before I ever entered a classroom. I am eternally grateful to him for that.