UKG Syllabus Explained: English, Maths and EVS Month by Month

What the UKG Syllabus Covers

A typical UKG syllabus covers three areas. English: letter sounds, vowels and consonants, three-letter words, word families, sight words and simple sentences. Maths: numbers to 50 or 100, number names, before/after/between, addition and subtraction within 10 or 20, shapes, patterns and measurement. EVS: myself, family, home, school, food, animals, plants, seasons, transport and community helpers.

There is no single national UKG syllabus. CBSE and ICSE schools set their own pre-primary programmes, state boards publish their own, and many schools follow a publisher's series. What they share is a broadly similar order, because it follows how 5-year-olds learn. Since NEP 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework for the Foundational Stage (NCF-FS 2022), that order has also been framed around development rather than content alone. The UKG worksheets on RaisoActive follow the same progression.

This guide describes what typically happens, month by month, so you can see where your child is and what comes next. Your school's planner will differ in detail; treat it as the final word and this guide as the map.

How NEP 2020 Frames the UKG Year

NCF-FS 2022 describes the Foundational Stage (ages 3–8) in terms of five domains of development: physical; socio-emotional and ethical; cognitive; language and literacy; and aesthetic and cultural. English, maths and EVS are how most schools organise the timetable, but a good UKG class is also building attention, self-regulation and habits of learning across the day. Keep that in mind as you read: a child who is slower at sums but plays, listens and persists is in a strong position.

UKG English: From Sounds to Sentences

UKG English assumes the child arrives from LKG recognising most capital and small letters. The year then moves in a fairly fixed order: letter sounds, vowels and consonants, two-letter and three-letter words, word families, sight words, and finally reading and writing short sentences. Many schools begin cursive or joined-writing patterns in the second half of the year; some leave that to Class 1.

What the English year usually includes

• Revision of A–Z in capitals and small letters, with correct formation on four-line pages
• Letter sounds (phonics), then the five vowels and the difference between vowels and consonants
• Two-letter words (at, in, on, up) and three-letter CVC words in families: -at, -an, -en, -ig, -ot, -ug
• Sight words such as the, is, a, and, this, that, and reading simple sentences built from them
• Rhyming words, opposites, naming words, one and many, this/that and these/those
• Picture reading, listening to stories and answering simple questions; a few lines of dictation by the end of the year

The step that decides the year is blending: hearing c-a-t and saying "cat". Children who blend by the middle of UKG read simple sentences by the end; children still naming letters instead of sounding them tend to stall. Free phonics worksheets that pair a picture with a three-letter word give short daily practice, and the UKG English worksheets collection follows the same word-family order most schools use.

UKG Maths: Numbers, Operations and Measurement

UKG maths builds on LKG counting to about 20 and extends it in three directions: further along the number line, into number names, and into operations. The upper limit varies more than anything else in the syllabus. Some schools stop at 50, many go to 100 and a few push to 200; the number itself matters less than whether the child understands what the numbers mean.

What the maths year usually includes

• Number recognition and writing to 50, then 100; counting forwards and backwards within 20
• Number names one to twenty (some schools to fifty)
• Before, after and between; smaller and bigger; ascending and descending order within 20
• Addition with pictures and objects, then single-digit sums; subtraction as "take away" in the later months
• Shapes (circle, square, triangle, rectangle, oval), patterns, and sorting by size, colour and shape
• Measurement words (long/short, heavy/light, tall/short), days of the week, day and night, and coin recognition

Addition is where home support helps most. Schools move from pictures to numerals quickly, and children who have not had enough time with real objects start counting on fingers under the desk and guessing. Free addition worksheets with picture sums let a child count the objects, write the total, and only later work from numerals alone. The UKG maths worksheets collection covers the rest of the list above in the usual order.

UKG EVS: Environmental Studies Built Around the Child

EVS in UKG is not science in the later sense. It is a set of themes that start with the child's own body and widen outward: family, home, school, food, clothes, animals, birds, plants, water, air, weather and seasons, transport, safety, community helpers, festivals and national symbols. It is taught mostly through conversation, pictures, songs and simple activities, with a page of colouring or matching to record what was learned.

• Myself and my body: parts of the body, the five senses, keeping clean, healthy food
• My family, my home and my school: who does what, rooms and their uses, classroom rules
• Animals and birds: domestic and wild, their homes, young ones and sounds; parts of a plant
• Seasons and weather, water and its uses, air, day and night, sun and moon
• Transport (land, water, air), road safety, community helpers, festivals, and the national flag, bird and animal

EVS is the easiest subject to support at home because it is everywhere: the vegetable market, the monsoon, a bus ride, a grandparent's story. Talking about these things in full sentences and asking "why" does more than any worksheet.

Month-by-Month Progression (Typical)

Most Indian schools run a ten-month year from June or April to March, with a break around October or November. The blocks below show the usual order in two-month steps. Your school may be a month ahead or behind, and the sequence within a subject matters more than the calendar.

How to Support UKG Learning at Home

The most useful home support in UKG is short and daily, not long and weekly: ten minutes of reading practice, five minutes of counting or sums with real objects, and a dinner-table conversation about whatever EVS theme is running that month. Hemsweta Jain (Teacher Cheena), RaisoActive's founder and an early-childhood educator since 2014, tells parents to match the school's sequence rather than race ahead of it; a child doing subtraction at home while the class is still on addition gets confused, not advanced.

Signs a Child Is Falling Behind in UKG (and What to Do)

UKG has a wide normal range, and a child who is slower in one area in November is often fine by February. Still, a few signs are worth acting on early, because the gap widens in Class 1 if left alone.

• Still says letter names ("bee", "see") instead of sounds by mid-year, and cannot blend c-a-t into "cat" even with support
• Cannot recognise numerals to 20 out of sequence, or counts objects by reciting without touching them
• Writes letters and numbers reversed or with a fist grip well into the second half of the year
• Cannot say what a short story was about, or answer a "why" question about a picture
• Avoids all written work, or cries over a single page

If you see two or more of these, speak to the class teacher first; they will know whether it is a settling issue or a learning one. At home, drop back one step (oral blending before reading, objects before numerals, pattern writing before letters) and give it three or four weeks of short daily practice. Most gaps at this age close with time and repetition; a persistent difficulty with sounds or with holding a pencil is worth a check with a paediatrician or an occupational therapist.

Following the Year, One Step at a Time

Find out which block your child's class is in, print one page from the matching subject, and do it for ten minutes at the same time each day. When the school moves on, move with it. If you would rather have the pages without the watermark, an annual subscription costs ₹1000; otherwise the free downloads are enough for a page a day.