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May I suggest that your phonics education is incomplete as most of the words you list are in fact phonetic.

I would suggest in turn that your definition of phonetic is a little more expansive than mine. You could pretend that every word is phonetic if you list all of the exceptions as regulars. For a seven year old, it is not very helpful.

I understand that "FOUR" rhymes with "POUR"; but it certainly does not rhyme with "FLOUR" or "SOUR". I just came up with a handful of very short words off the top of my head. If you read with children who are taught with phonics, as mine are, you will see these issues pop up with great frequency, and in many cases brute force memorization will have to come into play.

Any language that is not man-made (e.g. Esperanto), ordered into regularity by an academy or government (Finnish), or simply utterly primitive, is going to have these issues, usually with some basic or very old words (which is why the verb to be is irregular in so many languages).

My wife does the teaching, so I will mention the Spaulding site to her. Again, this is NOT a slam at phonics. Phonics is the foundation of being able to read nearly all western languages well. Once that foundation is built, reading itself fills things out. Over time, we do recognize patterns, as we no longer have to sound out each word as adult readers.

I’ve taught phonics for 30 years and homeschooled my own four. Spalding is the most comprehensive. 70 phonograms and 30 spelling rules, 100 simple facts about the English language that are generally easy to memorize, so brute force shouldn’t be necessary. It’s quite easy to make it fun.