Hangman Part II: Baby steps toward literacy

Hangman is still one of the girl's favorite games. They play it daily and are even starting to incorporate words that aren't names of family members. Today while they were playing, Laine asks me "Mom, how many dashes do I need to put for 'turkey'? Oh, ok thanks _ _ _ _ _ _. Eve, can you guess my word?" Eve: "Ummm what about R?" Laine: "Ummm Mom, does 'turkey' have an 'R' in it?" So, they still don't quite get how to play the game, but they're really trying hard. Chris taught them a great game today. He would write a word, and whoever could figure out what the word said first got a point. They were getting really good. Eve was guessing quite a few of the three letter words before Laine did. I think Laine might be on the brink of reading. She can really sound out a lot of words if you prompt her ("Remember, Laine, the p and the h make a ffff sound when they're next to each other"). Eve always amazes me with her memorization skills. If you read a simple book to her a few times, she can read it back to you verbatim. I think learning sight words as opposed to sounding out letters might be the best method for getting her to read. With English, it makes more sense anyway since most English words aren't really phonetic. You really forget what an absurd language this is until you try teaching it to someone else. The other day Chris and I were talking about how ridiculous it is that in school, kids are taught that each vowel has 2 sounds, the long sound and the short sound. But what about the upside-down "e" sound? The uuhhh sound. Every vowel makes that sound. How come nobody teaches it? Does anyone have any suggestions for teaching preschoolers to read and teaching them English rules that really make sense? Laine has a video that teaches "When there are two vowels in a word, the first one makes the long sound and the other one goes to sleep." This is true for words like: cove, gave, and raid. But today, Chris wrote monkey, and Laine said "So we say "o" and the e goes to sleep, right?" and I wondered why anyone made a rule like that that so often does not apply.