This may sound contrarian - I think memorisation work with young children is great but reading is more than memorising it involves decoding and mapping sounds and meanings in a very complex process that restructures the brain. There seem to be a few children who just make the leap to reading very young but most western education pushes very early reading when I believe many children are not developmentally ready and it is a type of mental torture that leads them to hate reading. Parents who read to children often transfer a great deal of knowledge of language, culture and whatever areas you read about. It also typically transfers an interest in reading. I’m not in any way advocating for withholding reading instruction from children who are interested but to not be caught in the drive for early “literacy” that seems to lead to so much pain and so little good in those very early years. I am not a professional educator - I had a very different path to literacy and have walked through that with my children and seen this in others.