Learning How To Teach...Sort Of

Today we had our second visit from Cindy with the Parents as Teachers program. The program is for families who need a little help in making sure their children have the best opportunities to learn. As soon as we heard about it we knew wanted to sign up. With the word Teachers in the name, we thought the focus would be more on "classroom" style learning. While I realize that we all are constantly learning, especially young children, in everything that we do and see and hear, I was hoping for a plan that would help us be more effective in teaching the alphabet and numbers and speech. I'm not sure we're going to get much of that. So far the program has focused on, for us anyway, motor skills such as kicking a ball or stacking blocks. Today we played with a toy farm set to learn about animals and sounds and sang a few songs. Cindy said that when children are older, like around 3, she helps them with their name and how to recognize its spelling. Maybe there is nothing more we can do other than sing the ABC song and point out the letters and just use lots of repetition. We want to start Anna in preschool next fall when she's 3 and don't want her to be too far behind her peers. We've had the opportunity to meet a few 3-year-olds recently and have been blown away by their language skills. Apparently, a child Anna's age should be able to say a minimum of 50 words...on up to 100-200 words. I think I've written down about 30 or so that she says. Any ideas are welcome! For now, we'll just do our best and take whatever help we can get.