DD is nearly 4 and due to start reception in September.
She has recently started to segment/blend, mainly orally. These days she frequently will ask 'What makes /p/ /a/ /t/?' or similar, (meaning: what does ... make - her spoken language is not too great). Then check any answers against her expectations, so e.g. if I'd say 'that makes Pam' then she'd correct me. Also if we turn it around and I say 'what does /m/ /a/ /t/ make, she'll be able to reply 'mat'.
This is all good and I'm very pleased. It is always such a lovely think when they 'click' with blending.
However, she seems to really struggle to retain letters in her memory. She can reliably recognise s, o, x and c, and the first letter of her name but only in capital shape. Every other letter just goes in one side, and out the other. She's interested, she asks (e.g. at road signs, number plates, in books - she points and asks 'what sound does that make?') but it just doesn't stick. She has also started playing phonics apps like Teach your Monster to Read (she wants to do 'homework' when her older sibling does) but again, the letter shapes just don't stick.
So when I look at printed CVC words with her, if I remind her for each letter what sound it makes, she can then proceed to sound out and blend the word. Turn to the next page and she no longer remembers what sounds the same letters make.
This seems strange to me. Perhaps I'm blinded by the fact that her older sibling recognised all letters at barely 2. But it seems also from my experience in listening to reception children read, that usually being able to recognise/differentiate between different letters comes at an earlier stage than being able to blend.
I am also slightly concerned regarding starting school, as I know that once they start on phonics, they progress through the letters really quickly - 4-5 sounds/week. As it is now, DD would never be able to keep up with that pace. It would just mean that she comes out at the other end (when they've taught the 44 or so sounds) knowing exactly the same as she does now, i.e. 5 of them)
Does anyone have any experience with this, a child struggling to be able to differentiate between letter shapes, despite being interested and keen and able to blend? Is it simply a 'all children learn differently' thing? How can I help her retain the letter shapes in her memory?
For context, she loves numbers and maths-y things but struggled for a long time to distinguish the various number shapes from each other, too. She still is unsure at times and will often read a 2 as a 5 and vice versa.
She doesn't write at all, nor does she do any figurative drawing. Her 'artwork' is scribbles across the whole page, or paint to fill the whole page. No shapes of any kind (except in stickers/glueing cut-out shapes). In a way she doesn't seem to 'see' shapes. But then again, she securely and confidently recognises circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles. And she 'sees' amounts in a way that astounds me sometimes, e.g. up to 6 items she never has to count, but just sees how many there are; for 7, 8, 9 sometimes. And even if she is not sure how many exactly, she is very good at estimating, and if seeing e.g. 12 items will know without any doubt that it is 'more than 9' and cannot be 'less than 9'.
Also her speech is not very good, on the one hand she seems not to have done that 'implicitly learn grammar rules' thing, on the other hand she struggles to pronounce certain sounds e.g. a cat is always 'tat' which is somewhat ironic seeing as c is one of the only letters she can recognise.