Speechless

[Supergran58]

I read with interest another thread a while back of a letter girl who was learning her letters using the foam bath letters. I bought some for my grandson (11 months) who lives with me. Hes always been interested in his environment but just a normal regular baby boy, hitting milestones on time. Not yet walking but a prolific crawler, has a few words when he's in the mood but not using them consistently. Anyway Ive shown him "m" for his name and 'b' for baby using letter sounds not words. I am blown away that after only a couple of bath times with them, he's recognising and saying the sounds of these 2 letters. He even did it for his mum. Im sure hes just a regular baby. Im not a pushy gran but am a teacher and interested in how children learn. Just wondering whether anyone else bought some after reading about them and have noticed similar?

Mmmm I don't understand, sorry! Are you saying that he recognises the letters and says the correct sound to match them? Is that any different from recognising and saying the word for any other object?
Don't get me wrong - I think he sounds bright and engaged in learning to speak and this is fabulous, but I am not sure this relates in any way to the skill of 'reading', sorry.

Oh ok, I've just re-read and you're talking about learning letters as opposed to reading. Sorry I thought you were trying to teach your baby grandson to read when he was 11 months! Yes my son was a bit like this except with numbers- he learned the words that corresponded to digit symbols really early. That said, it took him longer to actually assign any deep and meaningful understanding of number sense and how these digits could be used and applied. These letters sound fun though- do you get duplicate letters in each pack? Like 2 of s, e, p, t etc?

I think most children are capable of learning their letters far younger than we think. Dd1 taught herself full set of letters upper and lower case in a couple of days when she was 20 months.
She wanted to play on the computer, and it really didn't do games so she wanted to type. She started just pressing the keys, and very quickly was asking to write words. So she'd say "write shoe" and I'd say "s... h... o... e" pointing to the letters. After a couple of days I didn't need to point to the letters.
I never set out to teach her the letters, nor did she think she was doing anything other than a game she had chosen. By the time she was 2yo she was reading quite nicely due entirely to this "game."

She learnt her numbers in an hour waiting for the bus at about the same age when all the other buses went past us and she was asking about the numbers. End of an hour she recognised all single digit numbers.

It was just something that interested her. Otoh colours didn't interest her and she didn't know her colours until she was about 3yo.

Ive been thinking about it some more and I guess in a sense learning sounds is easier than learning words...it takes more effort to say for example "dog" when they see a dog than mmmmm when they see a letter m. I guess mmmm has exactly the same degree of meaning as dog when its presented as a concrete object.
I wasnt trying to say grandson is bright because he can do this but rather that he can do this and is "just" a normally developing 11 month. Just pondering really about how kids learn.