How to Teach Reading

I have been thinking for a while - how do you actually teach reading? The above image is taken from Jolly Phonics who suggest that you learn the above phonics combined with sight words and then you are done! Is it really that simple and what happens when your child struggles?

I would love this Teach you child to read in 100 Easy Lessons but for now I will write down what I have learnt so far and add to it as my own knowledge expands! According to Piney Woods who has based her thoughts on Charlotte Mason it is best not to start reading lessons until the child has a good and thorough knowledge of the letters. This would tie in with Jolly Phonics phonics learning. They should also do a series of word building before formal reading lessons start. I am going to go through each step that Piney Woods has outlined to help me understand what it Charlotte Mason means.

Step One

The first step is word making. As I understand it - this is a very practical "game". In Charlotte Mason she suggests to start of with the syllable 'at'. Get these letters and put them on the floor and tell the child it is a word with use when we say "at home", "at the park" or "at school". It is now time to add an extra letter e.g. put b to make bat, s to make sat and c to make cat. I am presuming as you add the letter the child says that makes cat. My question is do you say "look, when I add c it makes cat" or do you somehow let the child work it out?

My other question is - do you teach 'at' as one word or as two letters combined together? I suppose if it is considered a syllable it is one sound. I could be wrong but I think in school they teach the children to sound the word cat as c-a-t. Learning this way would certainly be less laborious for the child! I now just need a list of all the syllables and three letter words! Eventually after a while the child can then read a list of words (I presume without heavily phonetically spelling them out) with ease. The idea is that eventually the child can do the lesson himself e.g. give the syllable 'en' and he then has to think of all the words or try out all the words he can with that one syllable.

I think I understand - it is now time to consider how this can be done in practice!

Extra:

This is a link I have found that I do not want to lose but not sure quite where to put so for now it will be here. It's on learning sight words when things do not come easily.

http://www.diannecraft.org/video_sightwords.htm