With a solid foundation, your child will not only read, but will read with enthusiasm. Learning to read is part of learning language. It's like a little leaguer learning to hit a baseball. The young hitter must learn to watch the ball when it is pitched, to step into it, and to swing the bat to make the hit. It's a single event made up of three acts.
Baseball players learn to do all three at once.
The same is true of learning language. When we use language, we speak words out loud, we read words on paper, and we write. Begin long before you expect your child to actually read, and continue long after your child is an independent reader.