Surprisingly, the process of learning to read is easier for children who are younger than four, than it is for older children.  In normal brain development in young children, there is a window period when the brain is most receptive to reading and learning.  

By the age of four this window begins to close and is completely shut by the age of seven, making it much harder and slower to learn to read at this age. 

Studies show that it's easier to learn the patterns of language early on in childhood compared to later. 

A recent Yale University study showed that "activating children's neural circuitry for reading early on is key" and a U.S. National Panel of Reading Specialists and Early Childhood Educators recommended that teaching reading earlier may eliminate most reading problems in the future. 

So if you are home schooling your child, getting an early start is important and it will make learning to read easy and a lot more fun for your child as they will grasp the concepts easily. 

When a young child learns to read, they will take everything at face value.  A word is just a word, like a chair is just a chair.

A child learns everything in pictures and will memorise and understand each word separately much in the same way that Chinese children will memorise each character separately.  So they will memorise to, too or two individually even though they all sound the same.  

By using this natural tendency you can quickly and easily teach your child to read the 100 most common words in the English language.   Most of these words are sight words and make up 50% of everything that has been written in English.  

So with one simple technique you will give them access to half of everything that has ever been written.  

It sounds rather unbelievable, but as an experiment, I counted the number of the 100 common words that appeared in one of my son's earliest reading books. The total number of common words that appeared in this book made up 63% of the content in his entire book. 

Therefore, if my son only knew these 100 words he could read 63% of the book by himself! 

A little experiment for you to try at home 

Show your child 100 random items that they don't know and they will easily learn what these items are within a week. 

So take a stamp, an eraser, a statue, a CD, a vase etc. and repeatedly show them to your child and tell them what they are and within a week they will be able to tell you what each of these 100 items are. 

You can use exactly the same method to teach your child these 100 common words and within a week they will be able to read semi fluently. 

By teaching your child to read these 100 hundred common words they will be ready to read their first book and the confidence they gain from this very small act will motivate them to read more. 

They will still not be able to read more complex words and when they start to sound out the words by themselves they will be ready to learn (phonics – sounding out the words) and in a very short period your child will be reading by him or her self. 

Young minds can learn quickly and we simply have to exploit this window of opportunity to make it as easy and fun for them to learn. 

By starting to teach your child to read at a young age and by using phonics and sight readingtogether you will see better and faster results than by delaying the process or by using only one method or the other. After all isn't getting your child to read quickly and easily your main goal after all? Use the right tools and your child will be reading before you can say A, B, C.