Thank you for posting this. I have been looking for a detailed personal account of teaching a toddler to read for a while. My son is two and a half and like this author, I have been trying to find out how to teach him to read. A couple weeks ago I posted my own reflections on what I have been doing here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hmcscreening.blogspot.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;on-teaching-reading.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hmcscreening.blogspot.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;on-teaching-reading...</a><p>I found it amazing how difficult it is to find scientific studies on how to teach reading, in my post above I kind of go into how the US government funded a large review of all the data in the late 1990s.<p>I think the most important thing is to just read to your child every day. My son also knew the alphabet before the age of two, but I think this is no different than teaching a child &quot;dog&quot; or &quot;square&quot; or &quot;ball&quot;, they are all abstracts to a degree. Also, learning the sounds of each letter was pretty easy too.  The hard part that we are against right now is putting it all together: I can&#x27;t consistently get him to sound out a simple word, even though individually he knows what each letter does.<p>There have been some comments wondering about issues of myopia if one has their child read. There is not a lot of conclusive evidence of what causes myopia, but recently there was a good paper published in JAMA where they randomized schools (this was in China), to enforce a certain amount of outdoor time every day. Those kids who were in the outdoor groups had statistically less myopia.