This is not to contest your overall explanation, but I should note that teaching with phonics can be fun. When I would give baths to my kids, we used foam lett

This is not to contest your overall explanation, but I should note that teaching with phonics can be fun. When I would give baths to my kids, we used foam letters that stuck to the bath walls. They would randomly pick letters to build a nonsense word with, and we would take turns trying to pronounce it. So they might randomly grab GSLKJUH and stick it on the wall and I would say "Guhslickjuh!" as I moved my finger across the letters in time with my pronunciation. It's super silly and fun. To make the associations of letters and sounds more obvious, we built our "words" iteratively, one letter at a time.