My question... did any of you teach children to read? Pros/cons? What did you use? Etc. Thanks!
Yes, DD was taught-- at about the same age as your DS, and with about the same results. Within six months she had moved on to Harry Potter and voracious consumption of any print material she could lay hands upon. She was never a read-aloud kid, either-- silent reading almost from the start.
I should preface this by stating that she already knew phonemes, the alphabet, etc. and could reason symbolically quite well (was doing math without manipulatives or physical representations). So she had better foundation skills than a lot of kids who are two or more years older than that.
We probably COULD have "taught" her decoding skills about two years sooner with the exact same result. (Long, long, LONG story why we didn't-- and not that relevant.)
We brought home a couple of sets of phonetically controlled readers (though she hated the BOB books and preferred something which is out of print now but was colorful and snarky).
It was the blending/decoding that she needed to be explicitly shown. That took a couple of weeks, working with her a few minutes each day.
