My boys have found their own roads to success every time I’ve gotten out of the way. My job is to litter the sides of the road with resources for easy access. Make things available and voluntary and children will be excited and learning just by digging through what you’ve left them.
I struggle with screen time, but Teach Your Monster to Read is an online reading game that my younger really took to. There’s no app, but it’s free and he could play it on his own early in his reading development.
I fought (literally, yelling) with my older to read things I knew he could. I panicked that I was killing his love for stories and words and I backed off big time. I still read aloud, went to story time, and played lots of audio books in the car, but I stopped “teaching” completely. Within months he (and his younger brother!) was picking up books beyond what I would have introduced.
God bless,
Jason