I was taught to read with phonics as a child. I really didn't know there was another way until my cousin, a teacher, told me about whole reading. It seemed bizarre to me since it was so different from what I had learned. I also wondered how are you were supposed to read a word you had never seen before since you could not sound it out. When my children were ready to learn to read, I taught them using phonics since that is all I knew and they were not in school yet. One of my friends let me borrow a set of Dick & Jane books while I was teaching my youngest to read. Though she had learned the basics of phonics and was already reading, her reading fluency improved dramatically once she started using the Dick & Jane books.
These days the newest rage is balanced literacy which is essentially a combination of phonics and whole reading.
