Appropriate grades or age groups:
Preschool and Younger
Elementary School

Estimated time to complete activity or implement technique:
30 min per day for 100 days

Materials needed (if applicable):
The book, "Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons", by Siegfried Engelmann & others

Activity set-up/instructions or description of technique:
All the encouragement, fun activities, reading circles, and most other activities recommended by just about everyone are useless if you fail to equip the child with phonics - the only known method for reliably converting unfamiliar written words into the thousands of spoken words that a child already knows. This book is complete (i.e. you don't have to buy any other things), it costs about $20, and it starts out with complete instructions to the parent.

Other suggestions or comments:
We used this book on our six-year-old daughter, who was very slow to pick up reading using any other methods. It was unbelievably successful, as it is for almost everyone else who uses it. I later discovered that it is written by the same authors who worte the world's most heavily research-supported and genuinely successful classroom reading program (SRA's Reading Mastery). Nothing else even comes close.