There was some bad science that pushed teachers (really administrators) away from teaching phonics as part of the reading curriculum.

I have a daughter in third grade who struggled a little with reading (horrible timing too COVID hit at the end of kindergarten so she lost about a third of that year)

She fortunately goes to an independent school who, as a result of some of this reporting quickly turned back on “phonics” teaching for reading but I’m not sure the rest of the schools have pivoted as quickly.

I'm wondering if I'm in the minority, but both of my kids learned to read before they started attending school.

My youngest was old enough to grow up with Netflix and we always keep the subtitles on, so she learned a ton from that. What she didn't always learn, though, was pronunciation. Some of the shows had no dialogue, but had captions for things which happened. Occasionally she will slip up even today (at ~15) and say something like co-croches instead of cockroaches. (Oggy and the Cockroaches)

It's not important, of course, the kids will get there eventually. A child wanting to read because it is fun is far more beneficial than forcing them to read. I love the "click" which happens when then they start devouring books endlessly, and when they transition from learning to read to reading to learn.

I had a kid that could read at 3 or so. When she reached the age to learn reading at school, she was forced to do the sounding out bit. She frankly found it all an amusing, though a bit ridiculous, charade. Kids will put up with a lot though.

Yeah, my youngest learned to read between two and three. I thought that she had memorized books, but she could read me brand new ones which she had never seen before.

She struggled with early education because she didn't like being forced to do things. Every kid is different, I suppose.

From my experience there’s a pretty wide range of abilities going into Kindergarten. I’d say that your kids knowing how to read would put them into a minority but a decent sized one, may 25-30%?

Also a ton of variation there based on what kids did before kindergarten, at home or, definitely kids from Montessori schools had more reading then kids like mine who did full time preschool at one that didn’t have an “academic” focus.

English doesn't have consistent rule-based writing spelling, so kids have to essentially memorize all word spellings. Since some kids suck at this game, there have to be compensation strategy to fill in the blanks. At some point it went too far and the last resort compensation strategy became the main method children are taugh (tough? tof? damn this language, it makes no sense) to read.

To be fair, English is much more consistent in the letters->sounds direction than it is in the sounds->letters direction. While being able to say a word in English hardly indicates a spelling due to there being several ways to represent the same sound, the opposite direction works pretty well, since there isn't a ton of ambiguity about what sound a given letter/digraph makes. The "exceptions" to that rule tend to be cases where we weaken (shorten/shwa/skip) unstressed vowels.