Do you read at bedtime? Both of my kids love books and reading because we read to them every night. When reading began, I used BOB books and when reading, pointed at sight words in books to have them figure out the next word. Once they could read, we had them read books like Dr. Suess Hop on Pop or One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Phonics is really important to reading!
As for amount of time afterschooling, DS6 is now in 1st Grade. The school requires daily homework, but we have permission to determine what that homework is. We probably spend 30-45 minutes a day. My son is a slow writer, so whenever the work has a lot of writing it takes longer. We only do 1-2 topics, like a math day and then a spelling and reading comprehension day. We do the Brain Quest Workbooks which makes it easy to choose by subject. IMO, I think it is important to cover multiple subjects, things the child is good at and some they aren't. Focus more on what they are good at then what they aren't though, because if it isn't required, then it should be fun to do.
We do reading aloud all the time, it seems. I read aloud during snack times, DH reads at bedtime, and DS reads when we practice. I have him practice one or two easy readers per day.
I think that's a better balance to switch up topics. I think because the school is so focused on reading then I have too. I like the BOB books, and Nora Gaydos. I need to get some of the easy Dr. Seuss books out, but DS has most of those memorized so it wouldn't be reading per say.
Our afterschool used to be computer game based (reading eggs, dreambox, etc), but is now more mom interactive because I felt the reading eggs was so random and we needed to start covering some specific phonics topics immediately. Dream box he liked but got a little hard with the fast number recognition so we stopped for a while but may start over the summer. He also really likes little tablet math games (addition for knights or monsters, etc), so I don't think I'll count that toward our time.
