Starting as early as pregnancy, moms are worrying and hoping for the best when it comes to their new sweet baby hitting their milestones and developing skills on-track. So it’s natural to wonder if your 2-year old (or 3, or 4, or 5 year old!) is understanding letters and the alphabet as well as other kids their age. In this article we’ll answer the question of how many letters should a 2 year-old know as well as give you all the tips and tricks you need to help your pre-reader launch into literacy success.
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Along with their ABCs and 123s, make sure your little one is also learning kindness. Start by reading I Am Kind: Kindness Practices for Kids.
So, How Many Letters Should a 2 Year-Old Know?
Like a lot of milestone questions, the answer is…it varies. And, as you may have noticed, there is a huge difference between a child who just turned two and a 2-year-old who is almost 3. At 2, many toddlers are just not ready to learn letters. But others can already recognize a few letters, especially those that they see often, like those in their names. For example, if a child’s name is Amy, she may know the letter A.
Kids who are read to from alphabet focused books may know a few more letters at this age, too. But especially for a young two, a parent shouldn’t be too concerned if the child doesn’t recognize letters or show much interest in letters yet. Just give them time. Instead, focus on learning colors, shapes, and animal names which may make more sense to them and feel more practical in daily life.
What Should a 2 Year Old Be Learning?
As parents, we often get in a hurry. We want to see our baby being the best, smartest, and brightest child ever. It’s just natural! However, we often need to take a step back and make sure the foundations are being laid before we rush into numbers or the letters of the alphabet. Before we start on the heavier subjects, we should make sure our child is learning and has a solid grasp on these basic milestones.
Cognitive Development
By age 2, you should see certain basic cognitive milestones from your child. These problem-solving, learning and thinking skills develop over time. Cognitive milestones include things like turning knobs or flipping switches to open things or to make things happen (making the connection between the action and the result). Another milestone to watch for is using their hands to do two different things, like holding a bowl and eating out of it. They will also be playing with more than one toy at once, like stacking blocks or putting a stuffed animal on a toy car.
Toward the end 2 and into age 3, kids will begin to mimic more challenging tasks when taught, like drawing a circle, which indicates that they are getting ready to learn how to draw letters or numbers as well. At this time, a child will also begin to understand and listen to warnings, like “Don’t touch that bush, it’s sharp and spiky!” (Now whether they actually avoid it is a whole other discussion!) There are also physical and emotional milestones to watch for.
Language and Communication
Also related to letter learning is a child’s language and communication check boxes. By age 2 most kids are putting two or more words together, understanding the names of some body parts and identifying them by pointing (“Where’s your nose? Show me your hand!”), and using more advanced gestures (something beyond nodding yes and no). This is an area where there is a huge difference between children, and kids will be at different places. So don’t be too concerned if your kiddo isn’t hitting all these marks right at two years. My son was very resistant to talking and said only a few words up until about 2 ½ when he finally started using more words (and yes, I was starting to get worried!). But once he really got rolling, he never stopped talking. He’s ten now and I think he only stops talking when he’s asleep!
As your child moves into age 3, you can expect to see a rapid increase in the number of words they use and how they use them. You’ll probably start to hear a lot of those “why?” questions! They will also be able to express more of what is going on around them and carry on very basic conversations with you, other adults, and other kids. The more words they are able to use, the closer they are to really learning the letters that create those words.
Getting Professional Guidance
I’m a big believer in parents trusting their gut. You know your child best. If you feel that your child is not progressing, or has even regressed, get help from a professional. If you don’t feel your pediatrician is helpful or listening, see a new one. You are your child’s advocate and deserve a supportive and dedicated team. By getting the right help, your sweet baby will be on the best track for them and it will be a major relief to you. Trust yourself!
How Many Letters Should a 2 Year-Old Know? Baby Steps!
When it comes to the question of how many letters should a 2 year-old know, what it really comes down to is how many letters should YOUR 2 year-old know. Are they an older two or did they just turn two? Do letters come easily to them or are numbers more their thing? In any event, don’t be too worried at this point. Most twos only know a few letters or numbers. If yours can write their first and last names, sing the alphabet song, and count numbers up into the teens or twenties, that’s amazing! But most kids won’t be at that level yet. So breathe deep, do some reading, play some games, and focus more on daily progress instead of comparing one child to another.
How do kids learn about kindness? Strengthen early reading skills and social-emotional literacy with I Am Kind: Kindness Practices for Kids.
Pre-Reading Strategies for Toddlers
That being said, just because your toddler may not know any letters yet or even be interested, that doesn’t mean that you have to sit on the sidelines and wait. There are a lot of great strategies for helping toddlers get ready to read in the beautiful phase known as pre-reading. Pre-reading activities tend to be fun, and are also excellent bonding times for parents and caregivers and the sweet littles they are helping to learn. Here are some suggestions for ways to help your child begin the alphabet learning and reading process.
Start with the Alphabet Song
Putting anything to music makes it easier to remember, whether you are learning as a toddler or as an adult. That’s what makes the alphabet song so effective that people who learn it never forget it. (I can even still sing all the U.S. states in alphabetical order thanks to a song I learned in elementary school!) Singing the ABCs is the perfect start to pre-reading, even if kids don’t totally understand it. Once they hear it enough times it will sink in forever! (Hint: make sure to enunciate L-M-N-O-P so kids don’t think it’s an “elimeno” P. Trust me, your child will eventually ask what “elimeno” means if you don’t slow down in the middle there!)
Letter Game Play
Kids love magnetic letter tiles. Heck, even grown ups are known to have fun with them! Playing games is one of the very best ways to help learn concepts and make them stick. In fact, guided play has been shown to be more effective than teacher-led learning, especially in the earlier years of learning. I like this magnet set because it has all the letters in all different colors, so kids can learn both colors and letters. It also has some other fun magnets to keep it interesting! When kids are ready, you can shift to a magnet set that uses lowercase letters.
Age-Appropriate Letter Practice
At age 2 or 3, holding pens and pencils is an emerging skill. A child may not have the fine motor skill development or be ready for that level of eye-hand coordination. But you can practice finger drawing in sand or rice or other similar materials. Spread the sand or rice in a sheet pan with edges or a box with a smooth bottom and show them how to draw in the material. Start with simple shapes like a circle or a wiggly line and work up from there when they are ready to learn to draw letters and numbers. Learning to spell their names is a great first step when they are ready to build words!
When they’re ready, you can also introduce educational coloring pages that help them learn letters and practice spelling, like months of the year coloring pages, or practice shapes and how to spell them. This is a great way to make learning fun and help build those fine motor skills! (Hot tip: to save on paper, laminate the coloring page and let them use and re-use it many times. Learn how to use a laminator and your parenting life will never be the same!)
Follow-Along Reading
When you read together, you can point to the words as you say them so your child associates the sounds with written words. If you do screen time, you can watch videos with your child that read a story while showing the words at the same time. This method keeps kids engaged while exposing them to the concepts of words and letters. (It’s also one of the best ways to develop language skills in a foreign language!) Use books and videos where your child can follow along and see pictures of objects and the words or names for them together. Point to the images and say the names of the items. Then point to the names of the items and say it again. This helps build powerful literacy skills and connections in the brain. You can find many videos in this style on my YouTube channel.
Reading, Reading, Reading
It shouldn’t be any surprise that hands-down one of the best ways to promote letter learning is by reading with our kids. Even reading to a newborn baby builds those skills including language processing, listening, and eventually letter recognition and alphabet learning. Best of all, reading with kids is serious bonding time. It’s also just plain fun! So while you should choose the books you read together carefully, be sure to get a range of subjects and styles. Do some fact-based, some make-believe, some rhyming, and some designed to build social skills like a kindness book. Go for a variety of illustration styles and some with actual photographs. This is brain and bond building time you won’t want to miss, so just get started as early as possible with your sweet baby!
Do your kids know kindness when they see it? Learn about the Golden Rule and start a kindness revolution with I Am Kind: Kindness Practices for Kids.
Early Literacy Q&A: Pregnancy Reading, Screen Time, and Best Books
Starting as early as pregnancy, expectant parents want to get their child off on the right educational foot. Whether your baby is still in your belly, starting potty training, or preparing for preschool, being a parent of a young child means having lots and lots of questions. When do kids learn to tie shoes? When do kids learn left and right? What rhymes with taco? (Funny, but you’d be surprised how many times this question gets asked!) Here are some questions about reading, language, and literacy that I had and that may help you with your kids, too.
Does Reading During Pregnancy Help the Baby with Literacy?
It seems like a strange question, but actually your baby has been listening in on your every word, even during pregnancy. This is why many parents like to listen to classical music during pregnancy! While it may not directly help with letter learning, reading aloud during pregnancy may have benefits for both language skills and bonding with your baby.
Your baby will start to hear sounds at about 18-25 weeks of pregnancy. They listen to the sounds and rhythm of speech, preparing them early for language recognition. Your voice is one of the very first they will hear after birth, so your baby may already recognize your voice because you’ve been talking to him or her already for months!
From my perspective, one of the best reasons to read aloud during pregnancy is that it builds a reading habit. Do it every night at the same time if you can, and you’ll have already created a routine that you use after your baby is born. As an added bonus, this quiet reading time can also help reduce stress. So even if it won’t have your baby reading or knowing their letters at birth, go ahead and read to your unborn baby during pregnancy – it definitely cannot hurt!
Does Screen Time Help or Hurt Early Childhood Literacy?
The subject of screen time has become very controversial, with screens being placed in front of a baby’s face earlier and earlier each year. For some, the concerns are physical. What is it doing to the eyes of a child who stares at a screen too long? How long is too long? How young is too young? There are also brain development questions. How does this impact how a child thinks and learns? What about social skill development? If my child doesn’t have enough screen time will he or she be left behind in a world reliant on devices?
Yeah, no one said parenting was going to be simple. But take a deep breath and try not to stress out too much. We may be running a grand experiment with screens, with parents allowing unlimited screens on one hand and parents allowing little to none on the other. While we definitely need more long-term studies (perhaps that’s what happening right now on a large scale), here’s what the current data says about screen time.
The Plusses of Screens
Let’s go with the benefits first: there are lots of ways to learn! There are a ton of high-quality educational apps, games, videos, etc. that are designed to help a young child learn the alphabet, sounds, phonics, numbers, names of objects, and more. These programs can enhance the reading time that you do one-on-one with your child, but they may be more effective if you do them together. This will also give you a good idea of how close your child is to being ready for more advanced letter topics, like putting letters together to make names or words.
Another benefit is e-books. Parents can use e-books as an instant and lightweight way to share books at home, in the car, during travel, or on vacation. With a tablet or phone, your child can have access to an unlimited number of books that you select and it won’t weigh more than a pound. This is a huge relief when you’re already carrying diapers, wipes, bottles, juice boxes, toys, snacks, spare clothes, and your own water bottle.
With a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you can get thousands upon thousands of books with immediate access, from the simple reading you’ll do with your kids to learn letters and numbers to your grown up mysteries and thrillers. After your free trial, it’s just $11.99 per month. This is a steal for families who do a lot of reading (and I hope you do!). And you don’t even have to drive to the library (but I hope you do that, too!) So think about Kindle Unlimited (KU) and maybe give it a try to see if it’s a good fit for your family.
Other benefits of screens include improved problem-solving and memory skills and the fine motor skills involved in tapping, swiping, and tracing. (We all do a lot of that now, for better or for worse!) Screens can also give kids the opportunity to see and learn about other cultures, countries, and ideas to help them develop empathy and cultivate curiosity.
Screen Time Drawbacks
Now for the downside of screens. Screens tend to be passive, so if you use them, look for apps or videos that ask kids questions or elicit feedback. (Can you say the names of the animals after me? Do you see the monkey? Are these letters capital or lowercase? Do you know the first and last letters of the alphabet?) Screens can also cause a child to prefer the technology over physical books and the known benefits of traditional reading. Also, be aware that too much screen exposure before two years old is linked to delayed language skills.
Screens have also been associated with a reduction in attention span, especially for videos or games that move very quickly. They can also lead to poor impulse control, self-regulation, and poor planning due to the lack of real consequences for actions in a virtual environment. Parents also need to be on the lookout for improper content of a violent or adult nature, which kids could be exposed to unintentionally while on a device. Even innocuous games often include a chat function where a child can be contacted by someone without a parent’s knowledge and see words or images that we’d prefer they don’t know about yet.
Clearly, screen time is a developing issue that requires serious thought from parents. What, when, where, and how much are questions that need to be answered by each family individually. Speaking of how much, let’s answer that question next.
How much screen time is acceptable?
For some families, this will be almost none. For others, it will be much more. Here are some general guidelines to consider, but keep a close eye on your kids. If they’re exhibiting poor behavior or poor sleep, it could be related to too much screen time. Only you can make the right choice for them.
For a baby up to 18 months, avoid screens. One exception may be video chatting with grandparents or other special people to help develop those bonds.
For 18 months to two years, try limited amounts of content that are educational in nature. Also look for games, apps, or videos that are on the slower or calmer side to avoid overstimulation.
From two to five years, shoot for one hour per day, always with adult supervision. Things can go sideways on the internet quickly. Consider YouTube Kids to more easily find videos suitable for younger kids.
For ages six and up, there are no real set guidelines. The main thing is to ensure that screens are not interfering with learning, exercise, proper meal times, and the family schedule. Monitor for content and behavior. Remember, the level of screens we use today is a relatively recent phenomenon, and we have no limited long-term studies on the impact of many hours per day of screen on developing brains. No one wants their child to be the guinea pig on this one. Use your best judgment, have fun, and if you use screens, make that time count.
To dig deeper on this topic, you can start by checking out what the American Psychological Society has to say about it. Even so, go with your gut and don’t be afraid to hit the “off” button. They will only be little once.
What Books are Best for Pre-Reading?
Since reading is one of the best ways to develop letter learning, alphabet, and literacy skills, let’s go over what to look for a in a good pre-reading book.
Board Books
Board books are great, especially for a baby or younger toddler, because they are easy to hold and to turn the pages. They tend to be very simple, with fewer words and bright, engaging illustrations. Board books often cover concepts and early learning skills like colors and shapes.
Picture Books
The tried and true picture book is a staple of parent-child reading time. Pictures keep kids’ attention while the story ignites their imagination. Picture books can cover a wide range of topics and can have different styles of illustration, so try a bunch of them and see which ones your child likes the best.
Alphabet Books
Obviously when you’re starting on your letter learning journey, you’ll want some solid alphabet books that hone in on letters. A is for apple, B is for banana, etc. They are the best for helping kids associate the sounds the letters make to everyday objects that they already know the names for. Dr. Suess’s ABC book is an absolute classic!
Rhyming or Repetitive
When learning anything, repetition is key. Rhyming is also one of the best ways to commit ideas to memory. Books that combine both rhyming and repetition can be powerhouses to add to your reading routine! I love, love, love the Usborne phonics readers for this. Fox on a Box, Bug in a Rug, and Big Pig on a Dig are all great titles. Yes, you can buy these books on Amazon but I highly recommend asking around and finding an independent rep (they are now called PaperPie) to hook you up. You can get better pricing and lots of freebies for attending or hosting a book party, and you can help another mom earn an income!
You’ll also want to add rhyming books with vibrant illustrations and fun characters. Lots of kids are into robots these days thanks to the success of the Wild Robot books (much deserved – we love the Wild Robot!). If that sounds like the kids in your life be sure to check out the fun, rhyming stories Tip the Lunchtime Robot and Robot Activated.
Values-Based Books
Books that teach values are always going to be an important part of your home library. Books that teach kindness, self-worth, and friendship, are critical to building social skills and self-esteem that help kids grow into mentally healthy and resilient adults. Be sure to include these types of books in your reading routine!
Don’t just tell kids to be kind, show them how! Learn specific acts of kindness in I Am Kind: Kindness Practices for Kids.
From First Letters to Fluent Literacy
Your parenting journey, from pregnancy to new baby to toddler and beyond is an adventure. It’s filled with non-stop learning, both for you and your child. You’ll be learning the alphabet one moment and applying for college or trade school the next. All the in-between time is really where life is at. To set kids up for a lifelong love of literacy and fluency in all kinds of different skills, spend as much time as possible reading. Reading with them, reading to them, and letting them see you reading on your own.
Traditional book reading may just be the ultimate key to success with learning letters, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn some new tricks. Try a variety of books, learn letters with alphabet apps on a limited basis, and figure out what works best for your kids. Play some games, write some names, and you’ll be surprised how quickly your two or three year old will be showing off those alphabet skills – numbers, too! (I remember when my son counted to ten for the first time. So exciting! Now he IS ten!) Just take it slow, make it fun, and don’t apply too much pressure to know too much too fast.
One of the very best things about parenting is watching these kids grow, learn, and know just a little bit more each day. It’s exciting, and it takes us back to when we were kids. I know it does for me, anyway! In the end, how many letters should a 2 year old know will be a fleeting question, and she’ll be three, four, or ten before you know it. Just keep learning, reading, and singing that alphabet song and you’ll see results (and have loads of fun doing it!).