My 2 year old child loves reciting the alphabet on her own. Her mother and I take turns to recite the alphabet one by one with her. However, we noticed that when she reaches I she says Y and then Z. And also the other way round!
Sometimes she has also got confused between H and A.
We thought she'd learn the correct ones with time, but it has been over 3 months now.
Any suggestions for improvement?
User1751825 gave what I think is the correct answer: Don't worry about it.
At 2 years old, most children can say sentences with 2 to 4 words, and may have a vocabulary of only 50 words. A long list of alphabet letters is still a very abstract concept, and it is totally okay if they aren't getting all the letters, or aren't saying them in the right order.
Relax and enjoy this time. Don't spend it worrying what this might mean for their future development. It's adorable. Make sure you get a video of it so you can watch back on it someday and laugh.
Finally, I think user1751825 also hit the nail on the head with the advice: just model correct behavior. Don't correct the language at this point. A dear friend of mine grew up always being corrected, and it made her shy and not want to say anything until she was sure she was right, and wasn't going to get corrected. That's no way to raise a child.
Man I wish I had more videos of my kids at that age making those adorable language "mistakes." :)
What about displaying all the letters at once (teachers stereotypical have the banner of the ABC's across the top of their chalk board) and pointing at them as you sing them slowly?
EX: "G...point...H....point... I...point" so that she gets a sense for how long the alphabet is and that each part of the song is its own individual letter.
I remember when I was a child singing the ABC's taught me that LMNO was actually one word "I..J..K...ellemno...P" It took me beginning to associate the song with the individual letters to cure it.
Its one of those things that fixes itself, plus 2 year old seems very precocious in this respect!
However, what I think works to get rid of any imprecision in speech or writing is to show that you don't understand. If they are trying to communicate something and you don't understand it, they will get, at the deepest possible level, that they are doing it wrong and not producing the result they expect.
