I've been doing this for the past 2 years with my two older kids (now 5.5 and 3.5) based on the same reddit post this article is about. I've found it works grea

I've been doing this for the past 2 years with my two older kids (now 5.5 and 3.5) based on the same reddit post this article is about. I've found it works great, though I have high-focus kids. I call it "word cards". For the older kid, he learned the letters at preschool and then we did the Bob Books together. That worked well for phonics, but we hit a wall with sight words that require memorization. That's where Anki saved the day. We'd do 5 minutes of word cards every morning, and he'd get a token on a reward tracker, which eventually added up to a toy. Worked great for both of us. He's now a fluent reader, and I add unusual words we encounter to the deck, though I've stopped pushing so hard on reading and we just do "fact cards". For my middle child, I started with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (TYCTR100), in plain book form. That got her sounding out simple words at 2.5, but it's a really boring process, and I couldn't get her to do 20 minute lessons on a regular basis and didn't want to force it on her. But then I bought a set of TYCTR100 flashcards on Etsy and turned them into Anki cards, and that's worked great. Again, 5 minutes most mornings, though at her age it works better with a short term reward (eg, interleaving with Daniel Tiger). Apparently my kids said they planned to do "word cards" with their kids when I wasn't around. Anki is great at what it does, but the main enabler is finding a process your kids will pay attention to. I probably lucked out there.