I never felt like I was teaching a toddler to read. Instead, it felt like I was just waiting. All those pre-reading skills seemed to be automatically actuated by her prodigious complex language development. We just took advantage of that and it payed off. YMMV. We waited for her to become interested in learning how to read. And, then we waited for her to become interested in reading books. But, the skills seemed to be already there. And, the phonics versus whole language-- We never really had a say in the matter.
In our case, I felt like it was early complex language development and temperament that allowed her to sit and enjoy books for hours at a time, which in turn helped advance her language even more. And, I think it was her desire to understand language that instigated an obsession in figuring how to read (phonics), although not necessarily to read books. She was not reading books until she evolved into an whole language reader, which seems to be really typical for kids with advanced vocabulary and comprehension ability.
It really was/is this positive feedback loop. Now, all we need to do is keep her enamored with books and not sour her on them by pushing. None of this was anything I would have ever predicted, but we just trusted her and kept it positive.
