The year reading starts. These decks are about decoding — turning letters into sounds and sounds into words — rather than naming pictures.
Most English words can be sounded out. A small set cannot — the, said, was, come — and those are the ones worth recognising instantly, because they appear constantly and a child who stops to decode them loses the thread of the sentence. That is the whole argument for sight word practice: it is not a shortcut around phonics, it is a patch for the words phonics does not cover.
Everything else should be sounded out, not memorised. If your child guesses a word from its first letter and the picture, that is a habit worth interrupting early.
Knowing that c says "cuh" is not reading. Reading starts when a child can run the sounds together — c-a-t into "cat" — and that blending step is where children get stuck far more often than on the individual letter sounds. Our phonics deck works on the sounds themselves; blending them is best practised out loud with you, slowly, one short word at a time.
Two things are worth having solid: the teens, which break the pattern and trip children up in ways that twenty-one onwards does not, and number words in writing. Counting 11-20 covers the first, and the number matching game covers the second by asking your child to drag the digit onto its written word — recognising "seven" on a page is a separate skill from counting to seven, and it is the one school will assume.
Five-year-olds can concentrate for ten minutes or so, but the returns still fall off quickly. Little and often, and let your child read to you rather than the other way round wherever you can.
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