5 Alphabet Books We Have Been Reading My daughter, now 3 years and 9 months old, was talking with me after school earlier this week. She was asking me to tell her how many letters I knew, I quickly answered "26." Then I asked her how many letters she knew. Her answer was "29." Letter knowledge is one of the skills needed before one can read. Yes, there are 26 letter names but letter knowledge is also knowing the sounds of those letters which includes 44 English phonemes (25 constant sounds and 19 vowel sounds). Learning 26 letters includes knowing both upper and lower case letters, so knowing how to identify 52 shapes. And then there is the issue of different fonts and sizes of the letters. My daughter has been enjoying the magnetic alphabet letters that we have and we were just gifted a set of lowercase magnetic letters. She loves to line up a long string of letters and have us read what she wrote, ha! An uncle of hers does a great job of reading her writing and i...