By grasping the concepts of color, shape and pattern, infants and young children begin to recognize and organize visual information.

Learning about animals and their sounds is a fun way for infants and toddlers to develop language and listening skills.

Young children typically recite or sing the alphabet before they recognize individual letters. By preschool they begin to identify letters by name and shape.

Before they can learn to read, children must learn letters and their sounds. Once children associate printed letters to sounds, they can begin to sound out words for reading and spelling.

While children typically recognize uppercase letters first. lowercase letters are essential for learning to read because they make up 95% of text.

To learn to read, a child must understand the letter-sound relationship and distinguish individual sounds, or phonemes, within words. Crucial to reading, phonics skills help children sound out new words (If I can read "pot," then I can read "hot" and "spot").

Technology expands a child’s opportunities to communicate and create.

Identifying and manipulating shapes lays the groundwork for geometry by giving children concrete experience with angles, symmetry and relative sizes.

To begin their study of math, children must distinguish numerals from letters and shapes and to understand that numbers are symbols for amounts.

As language skills develop, some toddlers display the ability to count things up to 5 by applying number names to items in order. Preschoolers often recite numbers to 10 (but not always in the right order).

Matching develops early logic and reasoning skills and is a component of early math and literacy. Children match like objects, shapes, patterns, pictures and stories, letters to sounds and pictures to words.