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.

While many children can sing the alphabet song, the ability to sequence letters in order signals the understanding of letters as individual units of language.

Infants and toddlers learn vocabulary by memory. Later, children use word structure and context to help understand the meaning of a word. They identify synonyms and antonyms. They use prefixes, suffixes and base words to build their own vocabulary.

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").

Infants understand sequence in terms of time. By 18 months, some toddlers can recite number names in order, and some develop the ability to count things by applying number names to items in order.

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

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).

From blocks to cars to dolls, infants and toddlers actively arrange the objects around them, using visual discrimination to group objects by attributes such as shape, size and color. By kindergarten, sorting develops into the school skill of classification.

Young children are naturally intrigued by animals and animal facts. Interest in animals provides the motivation for later work in life sciences.

Infants and young children have an innate ability to learn oral language through exposure. Early and continued exposure to language sounds may enhance children's ability to speak both their native language and foreign languages.

Geography refers to the study of the earth and its features, including the ordinal directions (north, south), physical characteristics (oceans and mountains) and the effects of human activity.

The ability to extend, complete and duplicate patterns by determining the specific attributes of those patterns is a logical reasoning skill that forms that basis for future work in math.