A child who relies on pictures or the first letter needs more decoding, not a longer independent reading block.
Name the actual problem
Watch one page. Does the child sound the word out, or skip it and invent something that fits the story? Skipping is a habit that looks like reading from across the room. Up close, they are not mapping letters to sounds.
The IES foundational reading guide treats sound awareness and decoding as the high-evidence work in the early grades. If those pieces are missing, more "just read for twenty minutes" adds frustration. The child practices guessing.
A kitchen-table plan that is small enough to keep
Ten focused minutes beats an hour of arguing. Sit next to them. Point under the word. If they guess, cover the picture and ask for the sounds. Then have them write the word. Encoding is not extra credit. It forces the same letter-sound work from the other direction.
Use a text they can read with high accuracy. If they miss more than a handful of words on the page, the book is too hard for independent work. Read the hard book aloud later. Practice on the easier one.
- Do a short sound or blending drill, then a decodable page.
- Correct errors immediately. Do not let a wrong word stand.
- Reread the same short text the next day for fluency.
- Keep a list of the patterns that break down and reteach those, not the whole alphabet.
If careful daily practice for several weeks does not move the needle, ask your district or a private specialist about an evaluation. Homeschooling changes the setting. It does not replace screening for dyslexia or other language-based difficulties.
What not to do
Do not tell them to look at the picture and think what would make sense. That is the habit you are trying to break. Do not switch programs every two weeks. Pick one explicit phonics sequence and stay with it long enough to see whether the next set of words gets easier.
The National Center on Improving Literacy collects parent-facing explanations of screening, decoding, and next steps. Use that kind of source, not a social media thread, when you are deciding whether this is a late start or a real bottleneck.