Learning the Alphabet

Last Friday, I bought Sophie one of those foam floor mats that have letters and numbers you can punch out and put back in. Since then, Sophie's world has revolved around them, and our house has looked like an alphabet tornado swept through. She LOVES the letters, and is learning them really fast! The letters she recognizes are: A, B, C, D, H, I, L, M, O, P, S, T, V, and X. Of those, she can say A, B, C, D, H, M, O, P, T, and V. She also recognizes and can say the numbers 2 and 8, for whatever reason.

I think probably some of the constants we've established in her life prior to now have set the groundwork for this love of letters. She has been watching SuperWhy! for at least 8 months, and those of you who have watched that show with her know how much it glorifies letters. I have to believe that she learned some letters by watching it every day, because the very first time I started asking her about the foam letters after we brought them home, she knew some of them, and I have never taught her. We've always made a big deal about the alphabet song. She also has an alphabet quilt hanging above her crib. As many of you know, she loves her Dr. Seuss Alphabet Book ("Big A, little a, what begins with A?"), and her Grammy Sue had an alphabet flip book that she got really attached to during our trip. A few weeks ago, she started to get very interested in car license plates and would point to all the letters and numbers one at a time to try to get us to say them. Now that she recognizes some of the characters, she can't go on a walk without getting distracted by the plates on other people's cars.

However, I doubt she understands what letters are for yet, and we're working on that. We don't want to confuse her, but we tell her how D is for "dada," M is for "mama," and S is for "Sophie," just so she starts making some associations. And I think she's already starting to get more out of SuperWhy!, especially the parts where they ask the viewers to identify letters.

Perhaps the strangest thing is that she immediately latched on to the O. She carries it around with her EVERYWHERE and won't let go.

I also bought her a xylophone because she has already run into several alphabet teaching tools that all, understandably, use "xylophone" as the word that starts with X and I wanted her to know what it is (plus it's musical and percussive, two plusses for a kid her age!). The only bad thing about the one I bought is that one or maybe more of the notes are not the right size, so although it is supposed to play a major scale, it doesn't. But I guess it still serves its immediate purposes.

Last week, we found out that she has developed an intense discomfort about people she doesn't know coming into our house. We hosted a playgroup on Tuesday, and almost the entire time, she whined, whimpered, and wanted me to hold her. I thought maybe it was just too many people for her, but then a couple of days later, we had just our neighbor and her daughter, who's Sophie's age, over to play, and Sophie behaved the same way. She would get especially agitated when the other little girl would come near her or play with certain toys. Then over the weekend we had another couple over for dinner, and once again Sophie was not herself, almost on the verge of throwing uncontrollable fits. On the other hand, when we go to other people's houses to play with kids, she's much better. She also seems to get slightly better at our own house as people stay for a few hours, so I'm hoping it doesn't take too much time for her to get adjusted when her Grandma and Grandpa Moore and Uncle Stewart and Aunt Natalie come to visit! It's always a little sad when our relatives visit just for a long weekend, and one whole day is lost waiting for Sophie to warm up to them.