Abandon Ship!!

I've enjoyed BJU and thought it was a good program. I really liked the Math and will keep using their Math program. However, I've decided that BJU's phonics program is TOO MUCH for us. It is too much EXTRAS, too much time consuming demonstrations, too much song and dance, etc. (all the things I LIKE about the math I didn't like in the phonics! LOL). Besides that, I was beginning to feel that the phonics instruction given in BJU wasn't the right focus for us. I didn't want to spend the next 2 years slowly introducing DD5 to vowel combinations. I was hearing from public schooled children that were able to read level 1 books, and I knew that we wouldn't be able to read those books for a long time. Level 1 books contain words like "look, could, house" etc. I started to doubt the word family teaching focus - I didn't like the idea of teaching my DD5 words one day where the EA makes the long E sound (eat, neat, seat), only to teach her another day that EA makes the short e sound (bread), and then yet another day say that EA makes the long A sound (great). That means that for her to read a basic sentence such as "the neat bread was great", we would have a long wait before fully understanding all 3 of these words with the EA vowel combination. I also found that we had an issue with fluency. After one year of sounding out a-n-d for every sentence, my DD5 is just now finally identifing this word without sounding it out. With as often as we see the word "and" in text, shouldn't we identify this word much sooner than 1 year later? And so, I began to think that we should focus on the most commonly used words in the English language, rather than spending so much time sounding out the word "fig". How often is a 1st grader (or anyone else) going to read the word "fig"? My husband and I came to two different conclusions. My husband came to the conclusion that DD5 should memorize the top 1000 words in our English vocabulary. I came to the conclusion that we needed to learn all of our phonograms in a vertical fashion (example: EA makes the sounds E, e, and A). I was going to teach this and then apply it to the Dolch list. And so...given all this...we have decided to put BJU's K phonics lessons ON HOLD and work through the top 1000 words list. We will focus on the 1st 250 words. I don't feel comfortable with a complete look-say method and I still think that phonics is important. I have decided to teach the 70 phonograms from The Writing Road to Reading at the same time that we focus on identifying the top 250 words. I hope to get through this within the next 1-2 months, starting today. My goal is to teach DD5 that the word "to" can be sounded out, using the /t/ and the 3rd sound of o, /oo/. After we have spent time sounding out /to/, then learn to identify it immediately in text. I haven't decided what we will do after the 1st 250 words. I am really thinking about using Spell to Write and Read along with the WISE Guide by Wanda Sanseri. This method is based on WRTR, but breaks the method down so that it is easier for homeschoolers to follow. The Ayres Word list has also been updated (the original list, I think?, was the top 2000 words in English vocabulary, but the list was from the year 1919?)