Federal practice guides are blunt about early reading. Kids need sound awareness, letter-sound links, decoding, and daily connected text.
The research is not mysterious
The What Works Clearinghouse practice guide on foundational reading, chaired by Barbara Foorman, gives four recommendations for kindergarten through third grade. Two of them have the strongest evidence rating the Clearinghouse uses. Teach children to hear the segments of speech and connect those segments to letters. Teach them to decode words, take words apart, write words, and recognize them.
The other two recommendations still matter. Teach academic language and vocabulary. Make sure each child reads connected text every day for accuracy, fluency, and understanding. Language and books are not a substitute for decoding. They sit next to it.
What this rules out
A homeschool morning that is only read-alouds, sight-word flashcards, and "look at the picture and guess" is not a reading program. Guessing is a workaround. It collapses the first time the book has no useful picture.
You also do not wait for a child to "love books" before you teach phonics. Plenty of kids start to like reading after they can actually lift the words off the page. Waiting for readiness while skipping sound work wastes the years when that teaching is easiest.
- Practice hearing and saying the sounds inside words, not just letter names.
- Teach the common sound for each letter, then the patterns that break the simple rule.
- Have them read and write the same words, not only tap them on a screen.
- Read a short decodable text every day, then a richer book aloud.
Connected text is not optional
The guide's fourth recommendation is moderate, not weak. Isolated sound drills that never turn into a sentence leave a child able to tap phonemes and still stuck on a page. After the decoding lesson, they should read a short passage that uses the pattern you just taught.
If the passage is so hard they guess every third word, it is the wrong text. Drop down. Accuracy first, then speed. Fluency is not racing. It is reading the words as written without burning all their attention on sounding out.