When should they be saying their ABC's and 1, 2, 3's

[AmateurParents]

Hi all,

Me and my other half are parents to our one little boy so we are learning everything as we go along.

I have noticed my 22 month old can say his entire alphabet, count to 12 and can recognise numbers and letters. We have a little magnetic board which we play on and I now test him on (which he loves). Is this a normal thing?

Not neccesary at that age at all. And it's no more difficult than learning a nursery rhyme really. Knowing how to use letters and numbers is a different matter, butnot something he needs to learn at his age.

Sounds like you are having a lot of fun with him. it would be a good idea to start teaching him to say the sounds of the letters as well as the letter names because this is what they will teach him in school (obviously at some point he will also need to know the letter names too so this learning will not be wasted!).

counting small amounts of real things (shoes, socks, biscuits, pegs, smarties ,cars,toy animals,etc, whatever you have around or walk past in the street ) will help him to learn what the numbers mean so they do not just become a string of words.

colours and shapes are fun things to learn and look for as well, and he is not too young to borrow books from the library.

Your child is lucky to have parents who enjoy helping him to develop and learn, enjoy the journey!

Thank you viques. He loves books and would rather play with these than his toys.

That is a good piece of advice, didn't think to actually put it into play properly and to introduce phonics. I will definitely start doing this. So many people keep saying he is so young but why not encourage him if he wants to learn. We go to singing in the library but I think we will take a trip to loan some books this week.

DD2 is 21 months and can say her alphabet and 'count' to 20. However she's just reciting it... she doesn't know what the letters stand for and doesn't know what numbers represent IYSWIM, and how to use them. It's just the same as her singing 'twinkle twinkle little star' etc.
DD1 could do the same at this age, and at 3.5 she can now do some basic addition, subtraction, write her name etc. I didn't do anything special with her, just played and read.

If you put 10 things in front of him can he count ten things or does he just recite numbers? Would he know there are,11 if you added one or 8 if hyping took one away?

It isn't completely unusual, no. Though I think it's more common for them to 'get' this kind of thing later.

DD is now just about 3 but was counting before she was walking...so at 16months she was counting to 5. She's been able to count to 29 since around 2.5years, can identify all those numbers out of sequence, counts objects, knows her alphabet for both sounds and letter names and can identify letters out of sequence too. She's got very good recall for books and nursery rhymes.

She's not so hot on things that you don't initially learn with a sequence if you get what I mean? So she has a tougher time with jigsaws and puzzles than other children her age. And her spacial awareness can be absolutely appalling (Though mine is too so that may be inherited ).

You're going to have such fun seeing him develop in the things he's good at

I think it's pretty advanced for his age. Especially the recognising the letters. DS1 was like this, and I remember that none of his friends could do similar at that age (it didn't make a difference to his learning to read sadly though in the end- I assumed he would be a super early reader because of it, but actually he is only a bit above average in that regard now at age 6)

DS2 only started being able to recognise letters etc when he was nearly 3 which I think is still on the early-ish side for his age.

Your boy sounds very clever and lovely. Congratulations.

I think it's earlier than average. At that age DD was starting to know her numbers and could confidently count (recited, starting to be proper counting) and understood that numbers correlated to groups of things, but had no interest in letters.

I'd echo what PPs said - it's lovely that he loves that kind of play and that you're encouraging him to learn. You can introduce the meanings of the things as well as PPs suggested - ask him to count things like stairs etc, count backwards by taking things away, ask how many things there are, sound out the letters, start to explain what letters are for (b is for bear etc). You can play eye spy with the phonic sounds for example, provided the word sounds like the standard phonic sound at the beginning.

It depends a lot. If you do it a lot ( or he does it at nursery)

Dd2 picked up singing the alphabet very early, before 18 months, from dd1 singing it. People would stare at her as she sang it. Illusion somewhat shattered when she asked "What does el-emnopee mean?" (say it out loud!)
I don't remember her counting, but I do remember discovering that she knew her numbers really well when I said we needed 7 of something over round about her second birthday. I bought 3, and turned round to find her holding 4. So I said "is that 7, shall I check" and she rolled her eyes and said the toddler equivalent of "don't be stupid of course it's 7". I found that she was totally confident of doing that with any numbers up to a total 10.

Dd1 didn't sing her alphabet until she was at preschool at 3yo, but she knew all the sounds of her letters by around 22months and was reading and writing by 2yo. She had much less interest in singing songs and much more in letters and numbers individually.

She learnt to recognise numbers one grotty day when she was just under 2yo and we were waiting for a delayed number 2 bus. It was delayed by an hour and we saw every other number go past several times in that time. By the end of the hour she knew her numbers!

Ds I don't think I've ever heard him sing the alphabet and he's 9yo. Really not interested in such things. However I'll maintain he is probably the only toddler to be able to read and spell "Concorde" and "Sonic Boom" before their own name (and it's not a hard one). He needed those words to find the you-tube videos he liked, so he learnt.
He must know the alphabet though as he can put things in alphabetical order. I've never thought of that before!

For small children it's a mixture of what they like and parental approval. That's not saying the latter is a bad thing. if they've found something they find fun and they get parental approval from they want to continue, and that's great.

just bear in mind that ultimately what they need is not to be able to recite their numbers of alphabet, but to recognise the individual ones and be able to do 1-2-1 mapping for numbers to objects. Many children initially count by reciting the numbers as they point to the objects at a totally different time frame. Things like stairs are great for that as you move speak, move speak.
Although when dd1 first counted she counted with even numbers because we took it in turn to count down the stairs every morning.

Wowa, my grandson (I have PR) is 21 months old today and (in my biased way) think his speech is advanced - had about 20 words at 13 months, combing from about 15 months and now using 4 and 5 word sentences but is nowhere near saying the alphabet - he just wouldn't be able to coordinate a long string of words like that. Similarly with counting - he makes grunts like he's counting the stairs but not saying the words. He does however know a few letter sounds and has done from being quite young from foam bath letters but he much prefers other bath toys now so he hasn't progressed with this for the last few months. He has a good concept of 2 and asks for 2 boots to put on 2 feet. He also has the vocabulary of quantity e.g. Big and is beginning to understand opposites e.g. Up and down. He can also do an inset jigsaw with numbers to 10 (but doesn't recognise the number names). I thought (well hoped) he was quite advanced but stringing words together to say the alphabet and to count to 10 is still a way away I'd say..