The one thing I've learned with teaching 4yr olds to read you need to be rather crafty in doing it. I've had to use several methods in order to get my daughter up and running.
I will admit I didn't know much of anything about early education. My knowledge was limited to , teach your child to read at about 4.5 , 5yrs , 6yrs of age because that's when all of the experts say that children can learn to read. I had no idea you could really start as early as infancy otherwise I would have done so with my girls.
I didn't know much until my 4th daughter one day saw a commercial for Your baby Can Read on t.v when she was 3. It was the first time I had ever heard of the product or even was introduced to babies reading. Even then I thought it was a product that was most likely a money waster as I knew of no one that ever used such product. Still in my mind children who learned to read early were little geniuses and that wasn't my girls.
My daughter begged to want to learn to read and I ripped out my phonics program that I used with my other girls. Because in homeschool circles, phonics is the ONLY way to teach children to read. It was a terrible and miserable failure. Though my daughter knew her letters and her sounds she just could not for the life of her hear it put together. I began to feel like I was teaching my oldest. I 'tortured' , I mean taught her with phonics and it was a horrible experience. She didn't finally start reading until the age of 7 when I began to add whole words and phonics together. Even then she didn't start to read fluently until the age of 9.
So for Christmas of last year we saw YBCR on the Walmart shelf and my daughter begged for it and I bought it. I figured what did I have to lose? I lost nothing. I did gain a child that now loves to read and brings me books all of the time to read. I love that she is so confident now.
I did manage to keep her attendion with YBCR for all 5 DVDS. I useed them during her potty time so she was kind of stuck watching them. LOL.
We've moved on to the MOnkisee shapes DVD and are using Brillkids.
If you go to my blog (
www.thereedfamily-blog.blogspot.com ) you can read all about how I have gotten my daughter to learn to read. It may spawn some ideas for you too.