When did your DC start recognising letters? <PFB question>

[BabyLabyrinth]

DD is 19mo. She can recognise and say A, P, M, B, O, S, E, U and L. Am I being totally PFB to think that's pretty cool?

Her speech is really quite behind her friends', and she only has about 30 or so words that are recognisable. (Although she is bilingual, so that might have something to do with that.)

My mum taught her M, P and A last weekend, and I've been telling her the names of letters she points to ever since, and those are the ones she can remember. She can say them if I draw them for her, and she also picks them out of her letter magnets and presents them to me proudly

First later of own name, age 3-4yrs, rest not really until school.
I think you're entitled to be pleased that she's coming on well. :)

Bilingual does often mean they are behind in speech at this age.

Dd1 was very interested in letters. She taught herself the letters at 20 months (all, upper and lower case) in about a week when she decided she wanted to play on the computer. Very old computer, no games, so she typed.
Dd2 don't know when she started, nor when she knew them all, I don't recall whether she knew individual letters until they did them at preschool.
Ds was about 2yo when he discovered an alphabet book, which was his favourite for about 3 weeks. It was very boring, so I used to change the words:
A is for apple so rosy and red, B is for Baby who's just banged his head. C is for car which goes with a roar, d is for duck who's just pooed on the floor..."
I'll leave you to work out which were the original, and which was my altered ones. mine were better

My experience is that if they're interested in that subject, they'll learn. Dd1, for example, didn't learn colours until she was about 3.6yo. I was convinced she had to be colour blind! Just colours didn't interest her like letters did.

*letter not later... look who can't spell

My DS is 21 months and has been able to recognise most of his letters for a couple of months and also knows his numbers up to 10. His speech is good too but he was a late walker. And is not bilingual!

Interestingly he was able to recognise the ones you mention first too. Especially o and s.

Of course you should be proud! I think my DS is a GENIUS!

Thanks for your replies! Glad to hear you don't all think I'm being too PFB

DeWe, love your new rhymes for that alphabet book.

DD knows about five colours, although she can't say any of them yet. But she'll happily give me the right-coloured brick if I ask for it, and is quite specific about which crayons she wants.

She also can't say any numbers yet, but likes to point at each thing while I count outloud for her.

Schmalex, your DS sounds very bright indeed! How did you help him with the numbers? Should I just do the same as I do with the letters, do you think? I mean, she's only little, I know; there's no rush. But she seems to really like learning this stuff! And not all that long ago she was wriggling around in my tummy. Babies are bloody amazing things.

Are you teaching her A, B, C or a, b, c? The sounds will be much more useful to her if you teach them as phonic sounds rather than capital letters. Otherwise she just has an impressive party trick iyswim.
The sounds should be made without the uh too. So c is k ( like a click at the back of the throat) not kuh.
A friend of mine was convinced her daughter knew all her letters nod no numbers to 100 before she started school. The teacher pointed out at the first parents' evening that while she could count parrot fashion to 100 she couldn't count any actual things eg 2 cats and 1 more cat. She also only knew capitals which made reading really difficult. Try reading cat if you think the sounds are C A T.

Btw should have said - she clearly a bright little thing so no wonder you are proud.

You're right, shopping, she's saying A, B, C, not the phonetic sound of the letters. I've read about phonics on here as a method of teaching to read, but I would have no idea how to teach her it. Although up until this weekend I would never have even thought about teaching her this stuff yet.

We're in Germany, and I don't know how they teach to read here, nor whether that happens in Kindergarten (age 3) or school (age 6).

Like shopping says, my DS just knows the order of the numbers. He can't add up or anything! But he seems to enjoy it.

I didn't do anything in particular, we just count when we walk up/down stairs and when we see things in books or out and about that are worth counting.

If you fancy teaching her the beginnings of reading ( and I really don't think it's necessary before school but sounds like she's a little sponge and would enjoy it) I would order the jolly phonics collection from amazon. They are fun little picture books which take you through the sounds one at a time and explain how to say them. For example p is like blowing out a candle not puh. You get the child to hold up a finger pretending to be a candle and blow on it.
My ds could read CVC words like cat and bat before he started school by enjoying the jolly phonics books together. He was nearly 4 though when we started looking at them. Foam letters in the bath are fun too. We used to make words on the side of the bath. He is my PFB. With dd we hung around in coffee shops and went shopping instead and she could only read and write her name before school.

"We're in Germany, and I don't know how they teach to read here, nor whether that happens in Kindergarten (age 3) or school (age 6)."

Hi Baby, we've brought up two bilingual DC in Germany, and are now much further down the line than you (15 and 11). It's really lovely that you're proud of your PFB, and yes, it's really early and cool to be saying the letter names rather than phonic sounds, but in all honestly, it has little bearing on their later school performance (your PFB is clearly going to be clever enough to cope with a Gymnasium!). Equally, they soon catch up with the delayed speech as bilinguals - DD1 in particular was very speech delayed at that stage. It seems to be a point where they spend a year or so 'sorting out' the difference between the two languages in their minds, and only when they're reasonably confident of this do they actually start producing - but then at a relatively high level in both languages. DD1 was 3 or 4 before she really started talking in sentences. With DD2 the delay was less extreme because she was more influenced by her big sister. Now at 15 DD1 is utterly confident in reading, speaking and writing in both languages (has always attended a bilingual school using the immersion method) - and another benefit: bilinguals seem to learn a 'foreign' language much better via immersion than monolinguals (although there seems to be no advantage when using traditional language teaching). So if you want your PFB to learn a third language, just take them to that country, dump them off and leave them to it. Honestly, it works.

About reading in German schools. No, it is absolutely not taught in Kitas, in fact the Erzieherinnen will probably be rabidly against the idea. There is a fixed belief in Germany that teaching school material early at nursery level is damaging, and having had two DC now who have only learned to read properly in first grade aged 6, but who caught up totally with British levels within two years, I tend to agree. The big question is whether your PFB will be going to a purely German Kita/primary school, or a bilingual/English one. My DC were alphabetised in English because they were deemed English native speakers, while the German native speakers in the same school learned to read in German. The main difference seemed to be that in German they were taught that certain sounds were written a particular way, because German spelling is so much more consistent. In English there was much more of a phonics (or do I mean synthetic phonics?) approach using ORT materials. We found the German teaching quite old-fashioned - there was a real insistence on using fountain pens from the start and learning an overly complicated style of cursive which HAD to be identical for everyone. And in the first few school years they used stupid descriptive terms for grammatical concepts such as 'Tunwort' and 'Wiewort' instead of verb and adjective. but then a few years later they were told to forget all that baby stuff and only use the Latinate terms instead - British kids manage to understand the word verb from early on!

The tunwort bollocks happens here too, all that "doing word" stuff kids are taught.

Mine seems to have learned to read by finishing off their favourite books alone when I was too lazy to read them yet again

Thanks for all your replies. Sorry for the delayed response!

Aphra, thanks for all that info on the German system. I think you're right that the Erzieherinnen here won't be interested in doing reading with the littlies in the Kita. There are a couple of bilingual options for us nearby, but I hadn't really thought about sending DD (and current DC2 bump!) there. I'm very interested in looking at bilingual schools for later on though.

A friend of mine dropped by today with her (monolingual German) son, who is the same age as DD, and he says even less than her, apparently. So I don't think I'm too bothered about her level (or lack) of speech yet.

The way she pronounces her letters has got much better over the last couple of weeks, and she's even started saying the sounds in German if DH asks her.

She still can't say or recognise any numbers though!

Shopping, I'm going to look up those book recommendations and get them in the new year. I think it might be something fun to do with her while breastfeeding newborn DC2 in Feb. Thanks for the pointers!

My DS loved letters from a very, very young age. He recognised them all from the point he was starting to talk (around 18 months or so). I was quite smug about my PFB little genius.

Fast forward a few years later (5.11) and he still loves letters but can't be arsed to put them together into words. Reading has been a very slooooow process for us.

That made me laugh, Vagndidit! I'll try to keep my smug PFB-ness in check

My DS2 is 2.8 & does not know letters yet, but he has started to recognise numbers & will point them out wherever we go. He also has quite a severe speech delay so cannot actually the numbers, but clearly recognises them.