I built it for my seven-year-old and forgot my four-year-old

3 August 2026 · by Larry

I was at a friend's place and his five-year-old was on a tablet, doing sums. Cards with red dots on them, a plus sign, an equals sign, a cartoon bear cheering him on. He was completely absorbed.

I watched for a while, and then it landed on me: I have built a whole website of practice for my seven-year-old, and I have built precisely nothing for my four-year-old. She has been standing next to her sister at the tablet this whole time with nothing of her own.

So I sat down to build her something. And before I did, I made myself go and read what a four-year-old is actually supposed to be learning.

What I expected to find

Honestly? I expected a list. Numbers to 100, simple addition, reading short words. That is roughly what the enrichment centres advertise, and it is what I had absorbed without ever checking.

That is not what the actual document says.

Singapore's preschool framework is called Nurturing Early Learners. Its numeracy goals for the end of K2 — the year before Primary 1 — are things like: count to twenty out loud, count ten objects reliably without skipping any, know that seven things are still seven when you spread them out, compare two groups and say which has more, and be able to say that five is made of two and three.

There is no addition in it. There is no subtraction. The plus sign my friend's son was tapping is not preschool content in Singapore at all — it arrives in Primary 1.

The line that stopped me

Then I found this, from MOE, about getting a child ready for P1:

"A common pitfall parents may make is overly preparing their children academically, such as getting them to complete assessment books or attend academic enrichment or tuition classes"

Their reasoning is that a child who has already been drilled through the material arrives in P1, finds it familiar and dull, and loses interest in learning itself. And the first line of the actual P1 maths syllabus is "counting to tell the number of objects in a given set" — the same thing the preschool framework asks for. P1 assumes nothing and starts from the beginning.

I also read the Ministry of Health's guidance from January this year: for children between eighteen months and six years, under an hour of screen a day, watch it together where you can, and — this one stung a little — "do not use screens just to occupy or distract your child".

I have absolutely done that. Most parents I know have.

So I built something smaller than I meant to

My original plan was to take the maths app and make the questions easier. Having read all that, I think that would have been the wrong thing to build. The main app has stars, a timer, a score chart, streaks, a daily limit. All of that is fine for a nine-year-old chasing a best time. None of it belongs in front of a four-year-old.

So Little Lab has none of it. No score. No timer. No leaderboard. No streak to protect. A round is six turns, about four minutes, and then it simply stops — there is no "play again" button sitting there tempting her back. If a thing is meant to take a few minutes, it should end after a few minutes.

There is also no "wrong". If she picks the wrong card, the bear tells her what she picked — "you picked four" — and the right one starts to wobble. If she misses again, it shows her, and then hands it back so she does it herself. She always finishes the question by getting it right. I did not want a small child's first experience of maths to be a red cross.

The mistake I made anyway

I built the first version, showed it to Claude, and the screen said "This many altogether" above one set of dots and "We have" above another.

Words. On a screen. For a child who cannot read.

I had spent a whole evening on the principle that nothing should require reading, and then written instructions in English on the one screen that needed it least. It is now laid out as a sum instead — four fish, plus, a question mark, equals, five fish — because a plus sign is a picture and "altogether" is not.

Which, funnily enough, brings me back to my friend's son and his dots. He was right. I was the one being clever.

What it actually has

Five small games: count how many, find which group has the most, work out the missing part of a sum, match a letter, and match a big letter to its small one. The counting cards are fish, bees, apples and stars, arranged in the same patterns as dice, so she can start to see "four" without counting it every time.

It is not much. That is deliberate.

If you have a little one, I would rather you sat with them for four minutes than left them with it for forty. That is not me being noble — it is what the guidance says, and it is what I do with my own two.

And if you want to know what your child actually needs before P1, without somebody trying to sell you a class, I wrote that down separately, with the sources. It was genuinely reassuring to read. It might be for you too.

— Larry