I could do with some advice regarding my 19mo. For the last month or so she's become really interested in letters and numbers, so naturally we've been telling her what they are at every opportunity to try and help her learn. She can already say a few numbers, but it's obviously just repeating the sounds we are saying. I'm doing it with fingers, written down number shapes and we have an abacus as well.
With letters, our natural response was to tell her what the letters are called, but I have a friend who has school age children who has since said the best thing to do is to teach letters with phonics. Now she is our only child, and I'm 28 so school was a while ago and I've no idea how things are taught so early on. As we've been saying letter names for a little while, she's already starting to recognise certain letters and say the name of them (she can do O, C, S, E, H and Z). She always gets the name of these letters right, but now I'm wondering if we've done it the wrong way and are going to make things harder for her. Should we carry on as we are, introduce the sounds alongside the names, or switch completely to sounds? I've started sounding out simple words with her and writing the letters down, which she's interested in, but when she points out letter she still says the names.
I'm just a bit confused on the best way to do it...also any tips on how to carry on with numbers would be great. She constantly wants input at the moment and I want to take advantage of her enthusiasm. I could read and write before school, so I want her to be the same if it's possible.