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My almost four year daughter has expressed an interest in learning to read. I am lazy, and don't particularly want to teach her to read, but also can't afford preschool any time soon, so probably should.
Recommendations for methods/curriculum/concrete actions would be appreciated. Preferably that doesn't include a lot of small pieces -- my mother is really into teaching reading, but tends to give us a bunch of matching letter toys that are instantly scattered throughout the house.
At that age, edutainment is where it's at. Sesame Street has been the gold standard for decades. LeapFrog's Letter Factory and Word Factory are also solid choices (though their more recent stuff is reportedly hit-or-miss). If your daughter can use a mouse, you should also let her play these games at Starfall.com, especially the alphabet and learn-to-read games and "books." (If she can't use a mouse, teach her--if she has a PC with a keyboard and mouse, she's got all the tools she needs to learn whatever she wants, provided sufficient motivation!) Once she knows the basics, the Scribblenauts games can help with her vocabulary and spelling. If she has siblings, friends, or cousins who will play multiplayer games with her (like Minecraft or Roblox, where much communication is done via text messages), that can also present an opportunity and motivation to learn to read, spell, and type better.
Also make sure there are many books in her bedroom. A deep Dr. Seuss collection is a timeless choice, but there are lots of other options, too. Read a book to her every night--not to teach, just to read, hopefully your laziness will permit at least that much! Kids that age will pick up a fair bit just by osmosis.
Toys like alphabet puzzles and alphabet blocks presumably help in some way, I suppose--I know a lot of educators are really into making learning "tactile" for young children. But I feel like I've seen far better results from simply curating opportunities with books and screens.
This is interesting. She's at home with my husband all day, and this is much more his style than the kind of thing my mother did with me. She currently has a tablet, and likes to play games where she's supposed to trace letters, but then gets frustrated because it's actually kind of hard and not very useful to trace letters with fingers (it doesn't let me pass about half the time). Lately she's been binge watching Octonaughts. Husband has lots of opinions on computers, games, and Internet stuff broadly, and I'm sure can set her up when she's ready. (I probably shouldn't... he makes fun of me and my rose gold Macbook with only trackpad and no mouse). She watches him play computer games a fair bit, and he has way more opinions than me, especially about "fremium" sorts of things.
I have a mild lingering feeling that TV watching and video game playing are vices compared to reading books, but am not sure exactly where that comes from, or to what extent it's true. Other moms I know also seem to feel that way, but it seems implicit, perhaps aesthetic and related to class in some way.
Yeah, that sounds minimally helpful to me--especially in an era when handwriting seems to be on its way out entirely. Making letters is totally unnecessary to the task of reading, except insofar as your daughter may want to do things like write her own name and then read it back to you.
There are definitely times when the heuristic "if it's fun it's bad (or at least not good) for you" applies! And I would certainly say that poorly-curated media is like that. Educational shows like Sesame Street were specifically created in response to large numbers of young, lower-class children being left in front of television sets all day. The internet poses a similar problem, but in a way that is harder to fix. Plenty of games and television shows are rubbish--but the same was always true of books. That's why curating opportunities is so important. Fortunately, curating opportunities is a lot easier with the internet at hand. It doesn't take a lot of work, but it does take some. Just as parents should sit and read books to their children, they should also, I think, sit and play educational games with their children. Children learn best through imitation, so doing activities with them is very important, at least initially.
Also, there will almost certainly come a time when your daughter will have to work at something dull for her own good--it's just not at all clear to me that this is an important lesson for four-year-olds. Many countries don't worry about formal education at all before a child is 7 or 8 years old. I have known children as young as two years old who could read pretty fluently, but their understanding of what they are reading is limited by their experiences. It's actually surprisingly difficult to find good reading material for a six-year-old child who reads at a high school level, because the books written for that level of reading are also written with plots and problems aimed at appealing to teenagers. Precociousness is often a good problem to have, but it does come with some unique challenges!
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Everyone seems to think electronic entertainment is somewhat of a vice compared to reading books. They just do them anyways, sort of like how even people who know donuts are less healthy than salad still tend to pick donuts over salad.
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