For what it’s worth, the phonics book you mentioned was worse than useless for my child. After hearing from friends whose son was reading at four about how great this book was, we tried it out for months. It didn’t go well and eventually we gave up. Our daughter took things at her own pace and only really learned to read in second grade. Now she’s a voracious reader, writer, and straight-A computer science student in her junior year of college.

The lesson I took from all of this is that kids learn things, even basic things, very differently from each other or from their parents. Any school that insists on a single way to teach a particular basic skill is going to leave some non-trivial number of students behind.