Our son showed an interest in letters before he was 2. He would point at an S and say Ssssss.
So at age two and some months, I made a set of flash cards for body parts. So we would play "the body parts game", where I show him a card and ask him to try to say the word and to point to the body part. He thoroughly enjoyed this game. We did it in both languages (we are raising him bilingually.)
I tried to use a bit of creative fontology (is that a word?) to de-emphasize silent letters, like thum(b) and (k)nee, and to mark letter combinations like ch and sh. When he asked about the silent letters, I could only say that (for English) spelling is different (and kind of stupid).
Obviously spoken language is the baseline in all this.
> I could only say that (for English) spelling is different (and kind of stupid).
One of my earliest memories is the unwelcome lesson that the printed word "ice" is the spoken word /aɪs/ but "police" is /pʊˈliːs/.
In retrospect, it helped me get an early start on accepting the notion that substantial parts of life involve putting up with network effects left lying around by previous generations.
(upon reflection, I did ultimately immigrate to someplace where "Eis" is /aɪ̯s/ and "Polizei" is /poliˈt͡saɪ̯/, so maybe I hadn't been as successful with acceptance as I believe?)
So at age two and some months, I made a set of flash cards for body parts. So we would play "the body parts game", where I show him a card and ask him to try to say the word and to point to the body part. He thoroughly enjoyed this game. We did it in both languages (we are raising him bilingually.)
I tried to use a bit of creative fontology (is that a word?) to de-emphasize silent letters, like thum(b) and (k)nee, and to mark letter combinations like ch and sh. When he asked about the silent letters, I could only say that (for English) spelling is different (and kind of stupid).
Obviously spoken language is the baseline in all this.