Teaching my daughter to read, I discover that the shorter the word the more rules it is likely to break. Phonetics seems to make little since. Digging deeper I discover that the teaching technique for reading is to focus on both memorization & phonetics, leading me to Dolch words. On a side note, I have become a big advocate of sign language as a teaching aid to understanding both in communication & logic. While teaching her Dolch words via flash cards, I notice that giving her a sign helps her remember. She sometimes remembers just the sign and other times the English word. Baffling to me, teaching her more made learning easier & understanding quicker. She knows the 220 Dolch words and should achieve the speed I desire by Christmas before we begin the Dolch Nouns. She is 4 & a half years old. A lot of patience and focus on keeping learning interesting has propelled my daughter who has already read 6 different books on her own (Biscuit, Green Eggs & Ham, Time to Get...