Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons

A friend of mine went to college at 10 or something, and graduated as a teenager. He says he learned to read at two. Would it be exciting to raise a prodigy?

"Maria" learned the ABC song before she was two. Pretty early, I don't remember when, she could write her name. I looked around in a cursory way for how small kids learn to read, and found out about the plausible "Montessori method." They recommend not to call the letters by their names but by their sounds. You don't say "see ay tee" to spell cat. You say "cuh ah tuh." 

There are props, the "Montessori sandpaper letters." I bought some version of them, and told her that mom was spelled muh-oh-muh.

This way Maria learned some sounds for the letters. I had hoped that she would learn to read by being read to, which I did often. But she never agreed to try to sound out a word on her own. If I did get her to sound out cuh-ah-tuh, the sounds did not remind her of the word cat. She didn't learn to read at two, or at four.

Early in 2020 another friend recommended "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons." The cover says by Siegfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox and Elaine Bruner. More on Engelmann later. We finished it in May and now it might be my favorite book in any subject, anyway I can't stop thinking about it.

This passage from the introduction dispelled a lot confusion

The simplest procedure is to start with a word that ends in the sound you are interested in. Say the word slowly and loudly, as you would say it to a person who is hard of hearing. For example, to figure out how to say the sound nnn in isolation, say the word fan very slowly, holding each sound for at least one second. The way you say the nnn sound in that word is the way you would say  the sound nnn in isolation. Note that you do not say "fffaaannnuh" or "fffaaannnih." So when you say the nnn sound in isolation, you would not say "nnnuh" or "nnnih." You would say a pure nnn with no additional sound tacked onto the end.

To figure out how to say the t sound, say the word fat slowly and loudly. Note that you cannot hold the t sound. It occurs quickly no matter how long you hold the fff sound and the aaa sound (both of which can be held a long time). Note also that you do not add a funny sound to the ned. You do not say "fffaaatuh" or "fffaaatih." So you would not say "tuh" or "tih" when you present the t sound in isolation.

I already knew how to sound out "fan" and "fat," but my daughter didn't. I wasn't able to explain it to her before.