Even if you begin reading aloud to your baby during pregnancy and don't miss a day from birth to age 5, your child will still need to learn how to decode the printed page. You should monitor your child's passage through these various stages to make sure he's on schedule.
Most preschoolers are in the prereading stage.
Readers in this stage of development should be able to repeat materials that have been read to them over and over, particularly if the books are predictable and contain lots of rhyming words. They also know that groups of letters written on a page stand for words. Once your child is in kindergarten, he should learn to hear the differences between the various sounds that letters make. This ability is an important prerequisite to learning to read, and without it, even the best phonics instruction can fail. In 1st grade, your child should move into the decoding stage, where children begin to associate letters with sounds and spoken words with printed ones.