You can teach your child to read.

The Internet is full of stories of public school were NONE of the children could read at grade level.  This is astounding and discouraging.  I went to public school many years ago, and things were not that bad, then.

First thing you can try is to get your kid out of the failing school and into a better one.  The Catholic Church runs many parochial schools, from kindergarten up thru 12^th grade that do an excellent job.  My three children attended parochial school even though we are not Catholic.  Best move we ever made.

Or you can teach the child yourself.  If you graduated high school you are better prepared for teaching than any education major out of college.  Motivation is a key step.  You need to read aloud to the child.  When he/she sees that Dad or Mom reads, they want to do it to. You need some good books, written for kids your kid’s age.  Weed out any books that go off into politics, or critical race theory or sex, they merely bore young children.  Dr Seuss is very good.

There are two ways to teach reading to children, phonics and the “whole word method”.  Stick with teaching phonics, whole word is unteachable and does not work in many cases.

For phonics the child needs to know the names of each letter of the alphabet and the sound each letter represents.  The Alphabet Song from preschool works well for this.  And the child needs to recognize upper and lower case letters and understand that the pronunciation does not change because of case. 

Now we can start phonics.  Start with simple short words like dog or cat.  Have the child say the letters of the word.  With some repetition the child will hear the letters and the word they form.  After some phonics work give the child a reward by reading something out aloud.

   After a while the child will be able to just look at the word and know its meaning, pronunciation, and some connotations and denotations that go with it.  This is the beginning of “whole word” method.  Keep up the phonics.  New readers encounter a lot of words they have never seen before, but they can sound them out and get them with practice.