Flesch exercises are a wonderful way to systematically introduce traditional phonics fairly painlessly. The idea to put them into LR format was not mine, rather I stole it from Larry Sanger. You can find his method for using them in his ebook available here:
www.larrysanger.org. He's made a rather impressive video of his son reading at various ages.
After a miserable attempt to teach a just turned 3 y/o little boy to read, we went searching for better ideas. We were doing direct phonics instruction. You learn the sounds of the letters and then you start sounding out word, after word, after word. If your three year old doesn't revolt, by age 7 you might have a decent reader. Larry gave us the idea to put the Flesch exercises into the Doman flashcard format - aggravation eliminated. Progress has skyrocketed. Our then 3 year old is now 4 and decoding at 1st grade level.
In order to use the files it is important to first know all the letter sounds - not the names, just the sounds. If your child doesn't know them, they can learn them in about 2 weeks with Leap Frog Letter Factory video. Once letters sounds are learned, we take each rule in order and show one rule at a time 3-5 times a day for 2 or 3 days. In the beginning, the child is learning to combine sounds to form words. This is a the hardest part of phonics instruction for the child. To help the child we play a game called, "Say it fast." I say something like "Ice" and then "Cream" and then I ask the child to say it fast - icecream. We do this several times and then simply transfer it to words. "mmmm" "aaa" "t" say it fast "mat".
The first 6 or 7 lessons I will play the "say it fast" game the first couple times through the list. I will ask the child to say the words back to me ( after I say it fast the first time) to make sure he understands what we are doing and then I do all the work. We check his knowledge with worksheets and recently with Larry Sanger's new reading program Reading Bear found here:
http://www.readingbear.org/Once the child has the concept of sounding out the words, the rest is pretty easy, it is simply knowing the rules. A child of 2 1/2 who speaks fairly well should be able to absorb these lessons quickly.
Please note that the files I posted here do not contain all the Flesch words from each lesson. I found that 10 or so words from each lesson, if repeated, to be sufficient and remained very painless. If there is a phonics rule for the child to learn, I have included it as the first screen shot in the file.
Other helpful resources: starfall.com, readingbear.org, larrysanger.org (especially if you want a detailed description of how he used the Flesch exercises and ways to overcome reading resistance, which seems to be a particular issue with little boys.)
Sonya