3 year old better with numbers than letters

[Discopanda]

DD turned 3 at the end of February and has always been really bright, started speaking in sentences early on, great with colours, shapes, naming objects, etc and started recognising numbers quite early on. Letters don't seem to be sinking in at the moment, we talk about letters a lot, e.g. foam letters in the bath, pointing out different letters, alphabet books, letter magnets and we do a LOT of reading but she doesn't repeat back or recognise any letters. Is this normal?

Perfectly normal. Most three years olds want to play. They have more interest in mud pies than phonics. It is perfectly possible to teach a young child to recognise figures, but she is unlikely to truely understand what the number "6" is. Rather than giving names to symbols it's better to get her to count objects.

EVERYTHING she knows about her world, people, animals, clothes, toys, language, etc, she has, amazingly, learnt in less than three years!

What new stuff have you YOU learnt in the past three years?

Every new experience she is exposed to will be making synaptic connections in her brain, that will help to build her intelligence, memory, personality and more:

www.human-memory.net/brain_neurons.html

So, yes, do plenty of activities and games with her, talk and read to and with her, as much as possible, but please don't make learning to read, write, count, draw or anything else, a task that she needs to achieve.

A fun way to help her develop, is through music; if you can afford it, a Keyboard (61 full-size keys) will allow her to explore sounds, rhythms, sound-patterns, tunes etc. (By two our DS was playing on our Yamaha organ, and by five was reading simple music and making up his own tunes.)

Children learn what interests them, or what happens to have caught their imagination at a particular time.
Dd1 loved letters. She knew them all before she was 2yo, but she didn't know her colours until about 18 months after that.
She learnt her numbers during (for me) a very boring hour waiting for the number 2 bus. Numbers 1,3,4,5,6 passed frequently. So did a 789. By the end of the hour she knew her numbers.
Neither letters nor numbers did I set out to teach her. The letters she decided aged 20 months she wanted to write on the computer like mummy and daddy. So she sat up there and typed. After a bit she wanted to type actual words, so she'd ask "write mummy" and I'd say "m for mummy, u for umbrella, m for mummy again etc." and point to the key for her to press. Realised after a couple of days that actually I didn't need to point to the key as she recognised them.
Numbers came naturally from the buses "Is that number 2?" "No it's a number 1 (or whatever)".

Now I'm fairly certain that I pointed out colours, with the aim of her learning, to her much more than I pointed out numbers and letters. But it was letters and numbers that caught her imagination and she knew them.

DD2 and ds neither learnt their letters/numbers as early nor in the same way. I think they both learnt their letters at preschool, although I think they knew their numbers before that, I can't remember how they learnt it. And they're both doing roughly as well as dd1 did at the same stage of school. So it didn't show anything at the time except her interest in them.

I'm fairly certain that ds was probably the only 2yo who could spell "Sonic boom" and "concorde". He could both read them and type them before his name. The reason was very simple; his favourite youtube videos were found by searching those words. So he taught himself to switch the computer on, put in the password (mixture of 12 upper/lower case letters, number and symbols-learnt, I'll add by watching my fingers typing it in) open google and search those words.
Didn't mean he was a genius, simply that was what was needed to get to what he wanted. A little like bird brain of Britain really.

I'd ease off on all the letter activities (other than reading) to be honest, it sounds a bit full on. My DS is the same age, and occasionally we'll mess around with the letter magnets, and we read every day but I don't really do much more than that. He is however encyclopaedic on farming, as that's what's captured his imagination - he knows every farm implement, what its for, what order you grow crops in etc etc. as long as they're happy and interested in something, I don't think all the other stuff really matters - if they're interested that's diffferent, but just follow their lead.