Children first learn to listen and speak, then use these and other skills to learn to read and write. This is why socializing in the real world, with all ages, is much more important than learning how to read at an early age. Pointing at each word as you read to your child will help connect the written word to the spoken word which works wonders in helping children learn how to read.
"Educator Linda Dobson has declared that in a home environment where parents value reading and writing, “children will learn to read and write as naturally as they learn to walk and talk.”
You don't need to teach reading - Penelope Trunk Education
“As long as kids grow up in a literate society, surrounded by people who read, they will learn to read. They may ask some questions along the way and get a few pointers from others who already know how to read, but they will take the initiative in all of this and orchestrate the entire process themselves.” ~ Peter Gray
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How My Son Learned to Read When We Stopped Trying to Teach Him • Isaac Morehouse
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“The reason that kids need to learn to read so early in school is because in school kids read about doing stuff instead of doing stuff. When kids live life outside of school they actually get to do stuff, so it’s not as important to read about it in order to learn.” ~ Lisa Nielsen
“It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching.” ~ John Taylor Gatto
“Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.” ~ George Carlin
“What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
“It’s not so much what children learn through play, but what they won’t learn if we don’t give them the chance to play. Many functional skills like literacy and arithmetic can be learned either through play or through instruction – the issue is the amount of stress on the child. However, many coping skills like compassion, self-regulation, self-confidence, the habit of active engagement, and the motivation to learn and be literate cannot be instructed. They can only be learned through self-directed experience (i.e. play)." ~ Susan J. Oliver
“Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.” ~ Horace Mann
“Teach your children to read, not by forcing or pressuring them to read, but by reading to them, every day. Bear in mind that this can begin as soon as they’re old enough to focus on the most basic story.” ~ Larry Garf
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” ~ Albert Einstein
“Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read.” ~ Marilyn Jager Adams
“Rather than books and lectures, nature itself is children’s best teacher.” ~ Coffey
“Developing the habit of reading in our children is the true beginning of self-education. This habit along with good manners and good speech, even the humblest homeschool can achieve though the costliest school may not.” ~ Karen Andreola, “Morning Moments”
“It is all-important to bear in mind that the child only begins to pass from consciousness to self-consciousness between the ages of nine and ten. To teach grammar before this age, therefore, is absolutely irrational.” ~ Rudolf Steiner
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” ~ Haruki Murakami, [Norwegian Wood]
“A native of America who cannot read or write is . . . as rare as a comet or an earthquake.” ~ John Adams
“Think of reading like riding a bicycle: One doesn’t consciously name the muscles involved or the particular actions required of each, or the parts of the bicycle, or Newton’s laws of motion, or the physics of gears, or the changes in brain chemistry associated with balance. One gets up on the seat and starts to pedal.” ~ David Albert
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” ~ Alvin Toffler
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” ~ Augustine of Hippo
“There are as many approaches to unschooling as there are people, by design. A child is supported to read when ready and interested, not on another’s timetable, for example. He can and will be encouraged to pursue a wide range of interests, based on his interests, such as free play, inventing, experimenting scientifically, video gaming, role modeling through friendship, spiritual development through inquiry of self and others, athletics, learning to trust himself and others.” ~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, [99 Question and Answers About Unschooling: The World Is Your Child’s Classroom]
"Everything we teach about reading, a task far simpler than many that the child has already mastered, says to him, “If we don’t make you read, you won’t, and if you don’t do it exactly the way we tell you, you can’t. In short, he comes to feel that learning is a passive process, something that someone else does to you, instead of something you do for yourself.” ~ John Holt [School is Bad for Children]
“The truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on. Millions of people teach themselves these things, it really isn’t very hard.” ~ John Taylor Gatto [The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher]
“How will they learn to read?” you say and my answer is “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them." ~ John Taylor Gatto [Why Schools Don’t Educate]
“David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too." ~ John Taylor Gatto [I Quit, I Think]
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If your kids are eager to learn how to read, make it fun, introduce games such as this award winning reading game:
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“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” ~ Emilie Buchwald