[snarkerson]

The tug of war between phonics and sight reading continues.

You need both skills.

[zozbot234]

But only one of those needs to be taught directly, and that's phonics. Sight reading can be left to emerge later on as the amount of reading increases. English is not Mandarin Chinese, we don't need to guess the meaning of words from what they look like, we can mostly read out how they sound.