The age where a child stops only naming pictures and starts recognising symbols — letters, digits, written words. These decks sit right on that line.
Somewhere between three and four, most children make a jump: they stop treating a letter as a shape and start treating it as a symbol that stands for something. That is why the alphabet suddenly becomes worth practising at this age when it was not at two. The same shift lets a child see the digit 5 as meaning "five things" rather than as a squiggle.
Two skills are easy to confuse here. Naming letters ("that's a B") and knowing letter sounds ("B says buh") are different, and the second one is what reading is built from. Our ABC words deck pairs each letter with a word that starts with it, which is the bridge between the two.
Nearly every four-year-old can recite "one two three four five". Far fewer can hand you exactly four blocks. Reciting is a sequence; knowing how many is cardinality, and it is the part that matters. The 1-10 deck shows the digit and the number word together, and switching it to random order in the gear menu is the quickest way to find out whether your child recognises numbers or has simply memorised the run.
Around this age a child can hold two things in mind at once and decide whether they go together — which is exactly what a matching game asks. Dragging a shape onto its written name is harder than naming the shape, and that extra step is the point. Start with shape matching, which uses pictures on both sides, before moving to anything that needs reading.
Sessions can run a little longer now — five minutes or so — but the same rule holds: stop before your child wants to. When letters and counting feel comfortable, the five-year-old set moves on to sounding words out.
Get every deck in the app
All the flashcard decks and matching games, nothing locked, and it works offline. $3.99 a month — cancel any time.
Subscription billed through the App Store. Some decks on this site are free to use in your browser.