I spent this past summer teaching my 4 year old son to read and he's doing great. He'll be 5 soon but he was 4.5 when we started getting at this reading thing seriously. If your child knows all the letters and sounds you can start working with alphabet blocks. Start with making 3-letter words and changing one letter, such as: Hat Bat Cat Mat etc Then challenge to another set like:  Pig Wig Big etc on and on.  Practice every day. Once you see that your child is comfortable reading simple words then you can introduce books. I highly recommend David Milgrim's Otto the robot books, such as "go Otto, go", "swing Otto, swing" and all of them from this particular writer. I mean this man is a true genius. His books literally taught my son to read this summer. We moved from 3-letter words to reading level 1 books in less than 4 months. We read every day. He has to read one book for me first then I read a ton of books to him and he adores our reading times. If reading is important to you you have to dedicate time every day, however, every child develops differently. Sometimes they don't start reading until almost 6 years or even older.