What should my child know before school?

A four-year-old in England is usually in a school classroom called Reception, sitting a phonics lesson every day, working toward a set of goals the government made mandatory[1][2][3].

A four-year-old in the United States has no national reading target of any kind. The Common Core reading standards start at kindergarten, the year after [8]. Below that, what a child is expected to know is decided state by state, preschool by preschool, or not at all.

Both children are normal. Neither one is ahead. If a relative or a parent at the school gate has told you your child should already be sounding out words, the first thing worth asking is which country's rulebook they are quoting.

Most children start Reception full time in the September after their fourth birthday [1]. That is earlier than the law requires: a child does not reach compulsory school age until the 31 December, 31 March or 31 August that follows their fifth birthday [1]. So the English four-year-old sitting a daily phonics lesson is in school voluntarily, a full year before anyone could insist on it.

By the end of that year, the statutory early years framework says a child at the expected level of development will “say a sound for each letter in the alphabet and at least 10 digraphs”, read words “consistent with their phonic knowledge by sound-blending”, and read aloud simple sentences [2]. A digraph is two letters spelling one sound, like the sh in ship or the ch in chip.

Guidance from the same department tells schools that daily phonics sessions “should begin as soon as children start their Reception year”, that ten minutes is enough in the first few days, and that by the end of Reception children need about an hour a day of it [3]. That guidance is advice to schools rather than law, which is a distinction worth keeping in your head when someone quotes it at you.

From Year 1 the national curriculum takes over, and it is statutory in state-funded schools. Six-year-olds are required to “respond speedily with the correct sound to graphemes for all 40+ phonemes” and to read unfamiliar words by blending the sounds [4]. A grapheme is the written form: the letter or letter group that spells a sound.

Nothing, nationally. The Common Core reading standards for foundational skills begin at kindergarten and run to grade 5; there is no entry for age four [8].

Kindergarten itself is less uniform than people outside the country assume. In the federal government's 2018 tally, the cutoff date for starting ran from as early as 31 July to as late as 1 January, most states sat on or near 1 September, and the table counts 18 states that required children to attend kindergarten at all [9]. Two American children the same age can end up a school year apart for no reason other than a state line.

Once kindergarten starts, the expectations arrive quickly. Children are expected to produce the primary sound for each consonant, match long and short sounds to the five vowels, read some common words on sight, and blend and pull apart the sounds in three-sound words such as cat [8]. By grade 1 that becomes decoding regularly spelled one-syllable words, knowing the common consonant digraphs, and handling final-e and vowel teams [8].

Line those kindergarten expectations up against the English early learning goals and they cover the same ground[2][8]. The disagreement between the two countries is not about what young children should learn. It is about what age to start.

Year 1 is not first grade. A child in Year 1 in England and a child in kindergarten in the United States are the same age: both turn 6 during the school year. English Year 2 is the one that sits with first grade.

Here is where that table comes from, so you can check it rather than trust it. English year groups run on age at 1 September, and children are admitted to Reception in the September following their fourth birthday [1], so Reception children turn 5 during the year and Year 1 children turn 6. Most American states set their kindergarten cutoff on or near 1 September too [9], so a child entering kindergarten has already turned 5 and will turn 6 during the year. Same age, different label.

Two warnings about the table. The American column is a rough fit, because a state with a January cutoff shifts everything by most of a year [9]. And a child who was born in late August in England is nearly a year younger than a classmate born the previous September, which matters far more day to day than any of this.

Nine of the ten sources at the foot of this page are tagged Policy. That tag is not decoration. A statutory early learning goal is a decision a government made about what to require and when. It is not the output of a trial showing that four-year-olds learn better if you start then.

The one entry tagged Research works differently. A federal panel reviewed the trials behind teaching early reading and then rated its own advice by how strong that evidence was: strong for developing awareness of the sounds in speech and how they link to letters, strong for teaching children to decode words and break them into parts, moderate for reading connected text every day, and minimal for the recommendation about academic language[10]. A guide that publishes its own weak spots is doing the thing that makes evidence trustworthy.

So when you are told what a child should know by four, the useful question is which of the two kinds of claim you are hearing. Most of the time it is a rule from somebody's country, wearing the clothes of a finding about children.

None of that needs an app, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise. Plimmery covers one narrow strip of this picture: the sounds, the letters, and the joining of the two. It does not replace a teacher, and it does not replace you reading a story at bedtime.