2 and a half year old recognising letters

[rachelp73]

My DS2 is 2 and a half and surprised me the other day by naming most of the letters on the front cover of a book we were looking at, off his own bat. DS1 who is 4 never did it that early. I'm sure it's probably not that unusual, and can probably be explained by him playing with an electronic Thomas the Tank Engine alphabet toy thingy, plus watching Super Why. (we've certainly never taught him anything like that)

But if he's showing a natural interest in letter names etc, is there anything I can do/particular types of books that we can look at to encourage his interest? (apart from carrying on reading to him as we've always done?) And are we better referring to the letter names rather than the sounds, if that's what he seems to be picking up? When DS2 learnt to recognise his letters at preschool he started with the letter sounds rather than the letter names.

I'm kind of expecting a fair number of replies along the lines of "just carry on reading to him as normal and forget about formal learning of letters until he's older". But just thought I'd ask.

we 'fish' the foam letters with a small net out of the bath, it's a great game. I put about ten letters in the bath, and say 'where is m' and DS1 fishes it. We also have a new take on the traditional flash cards - I hold the card so that DS can see the letter,and I say 'this word starts with the sound a, and it's a fruit, it's red and crunchy' and he has to guess what it is. We also play I Spy. I don't really want him to read before he starts school, but I would like him to 'want' to learn to read and have an interest in letters and sounds and numbers.

milliways, i like that idea! Trying it tomorrow.

When DS first started showing an interest in letters, I wasn't sure whether to go with letter names or phonics. We kind of did both. I felt I needed to do names, because that was what he was actually interested in, and because some of the sounds are digraphs (eg th) and sometimes letters have non-standard pronunciations, so I found trying to do just phonics too complicated.

But I've tried to also talk about what sound a letter makes (trying to do proper phonic pronunciation - DH used to be a primry teacher, so corrected me a lot!) and to do stuff like "M is for Mummy", and he's definitely picking it up. He's not as consistent yet with sounds as with names, but he gets the idea, so I'm hopeful that doing phonics when he starts school in a year won't be confusing.