Ben, I didn't realize you had a child of just that age. Please allow me to recommend to you and to other HN participants who surf by who are parents of children learning to read the best--bar none--approach to initial reading instruction in English for native speakers of English. It has worked for all four of my children, including the three who spent significant parts of their childhood in a mostly Chinese-speaking environment (reducing their exposure to English speech and English printed materials). The book Let's Read, a Linguistic Approach
by Leonard Bloomfield (an eminent linguist and pioneer of new methods of teaching hard-to-learn languages) and Clarence L. Barnhart (a lexicographer) has now been revised by Cynthia A. Barnhart and Robert K. Barnhart (I presume they are the original co-author's children). I used the first edition, and can recommend it UNRESERVEDLY. The first edition appears to no longer be in print, and some Amazon reviewers say they prefer the first edition, but the second edition, currently available, surely is better than the great mass of school materials used for English reading instruction. How I used the book is to set a goal of somewhere between one lesson a day and six or seven pages a day, and then read each lesson out loud to my child, with my child then reading the lesson back to me, with adaptation earlier in the book to do the reading and reading back a sentence at a time, and near the end of the book for the child to read by himself or herself without me reading first. All my children are strong readers who love to read. You'll find that this book, under Bloomfield's pedagogical influence, makes good use of spaced repetition of the key sound-symbol correspondences in Engish. But this is reading connected text, rather than just looking at flash cards, and the stories are remarkably interesting for their carefully graded vocabulary.
More details if you like. My main online involvement in the early 1990s was discussion of optimal reading instruction approaches for United States schools, but now I've discovered that mathematics education needs at least as much help, and have shifted focus to that. But I could provide (old) links to rationale for this approach if you like, and anyway an ounce of inexpensive prevention is worth a pound of expensive cure when helping a child's initial reading instruction prevents future reading and spelling difficulties. And kudos to you for continuing to read aloud to your child as he learns to read. Not reading to children beyond school age is one of the big missed opportunities in many middle-class families.
Aside to other participants: I'm wondering how many people who have used flash cards for foreign language learning have put their languages to the test in a country where those languages are spoken. I have studied many languages (I think there is a partial list in my user profile), and what I have observed over and over is how each language maps reality in a different way, so that ones rarely correspond one-to-one in the manner expected by flashcards. I much preferred learning to read Chinese, for example, by using the excellent Chinese Reader series by John DeFrancis
http://wsupress.wayne.edu/slp/bloomfieldlr.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic-Approach/dp/081...
by Leonard Bloomfield (an eminent linguist and pioneer of new methods of teaching hard-to-learn languages) and Clarence L. Barnhart (a lexicographer) has now been revised by Cynthia A. Barnhart and Robert K. Barnhart (I presume they are the original co-author's children). I used the first edition, and can recommend it UNRESERVEDLY. The first edition appears to no longer be in print, and some Amazon reviewers say they prefer the first edition, but the second edition, currently available, surely is better than the great mass of school materials used for English reading instruction. How I used the book is to set a goal of somewhere between one lesson a day and six or seven pages a day, and then read each lesson out loud to my child, with my child then reading the lesson back to me, with adaptation earlier in the book to do the reading and reading back a sentence at a time, and near the end of the book for the child to read by himself or herself without me reading first. All my children are strong readers who love to read. You'll find that this book, under Bloomfield's pedagogical influence, makes good use of spaced repetition of the key sound-symbol correspondences in Engish. But this is reading connected text, rather than just looking at flash cards, and the stories are remarkably interesting for their carefully graded vocabulary.
More details if you like. My main online involvement in the early 1990s was discussion of optimal reading instruction approaches for United States schools, but now I've discovered that mathematics education needs at least as much help, and have shifted focus to that. But I could provide (old) links to rationale for this approach if you like, and anyway an ounce of inexpensive prevention is worth a pound of expensive cure when helping a child's initial reading instruction prevents future reading and spelling difficulties. And kudos to you for continuing to read aloud to your child as he learns to read. Not reading to children beyond school age is one of the big missed opportunities in many middle-class families.
Aside to other participants: I'm wondering how many people who have used flash cards for foreign language learning have put their languages to the test in a country where those languages are spoken. I have studied many languages (I think there is a partial list in my user profile), and what I have observed over and over is how each language maps reality in a different way, so that ones rarely correspond one-to-one in the manner expected by flashcards. I much preferred learning to read Chinese, for example, by using the excellent Chinese Reader series by John DeFrancis
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Chinese-Reader-Part/dp/03000...
through which I first learned about Bloomfield's approach to foreign language teaching. (DeFrancis was a student of Bloomfield's.)