Too bad. Children who are taught phonics are reading before kindergarten.
There was no kindergarten, where I lived and when I asked my mother to teach me, she told me to wait until I went to school. I did not come from a particularly literate family. There wasn’t any help or interest from the family.
As a matter of fact, it was so bad that the superintendent of schools came to fist our house to discuss the lack of proper academic stimulation with my parents. They had given by brother an IQ test and were shocked at the fact that the district had never seen such a high IQ, especially coming from a blue collar family.