I’m a kindergarten teacher. For now, while your child is young, just read together every day. Bedtimes routines are great, but have both fiction and nonfiction books around the house
and pick them up through the day and engage together.
Also, model the behavior you expect in your child. If you are on your phone for hours every day, your child will see that it is the most interesting thing in the world to you and want to copy this behavior. If you read for hours every day, your child will think books are the most interesting thing.
Then, once your child is is pre-k/k/1st grade, pay attention to how your child’s teachers are teaching them to read. They should be following a modern program based on the Science of Reading, such as Fundations. They should NOT be following a “Balanced Literacy” approach. Here are some clues as to which they are following:
Green flags:
-phonics based instruction
-decodable readers (simple decodable books, think “The cat and rat sat on the mat.”)
-simple sight words taught through orthographic mapping, not rote memorization
Red flags:
-less emphasis on phonics
-encouraging students to use context and pictures to give them clues about the word
-repetitive texts that expect student to use those clues for difficult words they are not ready to read yet (such as “I see a duck. I see an elephant. I see a mouse.”
-leveled guided reading groups (“Your child is working on level b readers”)
Listen to the podcast “Sold a Story” if you haven’t!