Insights into learning style or aptitudes?

[Monkey Keeper]

My now 35 month old DD has been able to identify all capital letters for over 6 months now. The more interesting part, to me, is that she never learned the letter "names".  Instead, each letter is identified by its phonetic sound.  She has acquired a few names recently, but only long after she easily identified those letters by their sounds.

Does this provide any insight on her learning style or aptitudes?  It is different from my ODD's learning pattern, so it's intrinsic.

[Tjej]

Is your ODD, perchance, sounding words out around your younger DD?  It could be your YDD's learning style, or it could be the environmental differences of a bigger family.

It is fun to see how they all do things their own way, though, isn't it?

Tjej

[Monkey Keeper]

It IS fun!  (And thanks for responding.)

YDD is wired a lot differently in a lot of ways, so it is interesting to see how she picks things up--ODD is much like me while I think YDD is more like her dad.  I'd love to be able to adapt things to her style a bit better!

To answer your question, at the time that YDD picked up her letters, ODD was just learning the sounds as well.  ODD had names first, then sounds.  YDD had most if not all the letter sounds down pat when ODD started sounding out words.  We didn't even know she knew them till she started pointing out random letters and saying their sounds just after her 2nd birthday!

[heatherdeg]

Hard to say.  She's clearly responding to the visual representation of a letter, but also to the sound vs. the label.  The answer lies in what she's been exposed to how it connects to what she's doing.  Without really looking at that, it's hard to say.  You need to watch her more to really know and understand.

And you can google things like "multiple intelligences" or "learning modalities" to nail it down a lot better than "learning styles" (which is a far more generic term) for researching.  :)

[Monkey Keeper]

Thanks Heather!  I appreciate the input and the nudge in the correct direction.