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just through us reading to her.

Spontaneously. When I noticed, I'd write short words and ask her if she knew them, as a sort of reinforcement game.

We have a sight word wall in our playroom (I'm a teacher, so I usually make duplicates for DS).

Books that are repetitive and poems help. They can memorize it and practice pointing to each word as they read it. Then hunt for sight words in a poem/book. We put highlighter tape on a word when we find it.

I think just by spontaneously reading in context. Maybe tv or apps. I didn't do anything there. She went to preschool but they weren't working on reading yet.

He hasn't, so I am going to take a more active role in it now.

@Mrs Green Grass: I wish that would work with my son. He's extrememly stubborn and my goal is really just to get him used to the idea of learning sight words. Right now, he basically shows 0 interest in learning to read and won't repeat in those instances.

@honeybear: I guess I wasn't using the term sight word in the traditional sense of words that you should learn by sight versus words you should learn phonetically. LO is actually going to be going to Montessori preschool, so their approach is much more phonetic and from my understanding they don't really do sight words.

I just meant: she just recognizes the word (and some others) sort of naturally. We don't memorize words because she's 2.5 but she has just picked it up the same way she's picked up letters, shapes, numbers, etc.

@daniellemybelle: From the books on Montessori that I've read and our stint in Montessori school, their reading instruction method is pretty much the way we're doing it, although we don't have all the neat little wooden letters and boxes and stuff because I'm cheap. Anyhow, I think that picking up words as you read is exactly right for your LO's age. My son is nearly 6, so we're in the more formal stages of reading instruction. He learned to recognize some words from us reading to him and from signs and so on, but it helps now to have some additional framework to build on and the phonetic approach does just that.

My point was more that we really only have a handful of sight words so far that LO has to memorize because they don't conform to the (early) phonetic rules. And those come up so frequently in the stuff he reads that extra practice with them seems kind of unnecessary, you know?

@cascademom: I think your LO is pretty young too, right? I would not worry about things like this yet. Like I said, my son is nearly 6. I didn't do much beyond teaching him the basic alphabet sounds until this past year. I think if you're going to spend time on something related to reading before age 5 or so, absolutely the most profitable use of your and your child's time is for you to read to them. The phonics/sight words stuff is actually really easy and I suspect it's even easier if your kid has a huge vocabulary to draw on because they've been read to a lot.