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[quote=Anonymous]I don't even understand what the OP means by "knowing" numbers up to 20 or 30.

My kid (2.5) can consistently count to 20 but she has no idea what the number 14 actually is, for instance. On the other hand, she knows what it means to have one of something versus two of something. She knows the difference between doing something with two people versus three. She knows that if there are five speckled frogs and one jumps in the pool, now there are four. Those numbers all have meaning for her. But I'm guessing it will be some time before her world gets big enough to apply the same meaning to larger numbers. Or maybe I'm wrong! But I don't think a kid's ability to memorize counting up to a certain number indicates much of anything.

Plus, kids have crazy memories sometimes. We have songs that we sing regularly at bedtime, and our kid will correct us if we accidentally mispronounce one of the words. Similarly, she's memorized a bunch of her books and can "read" them to herself and will correct us if we deviate. But again, this is just rote memorization. It's cute and we encourage it because we want her to love books and learning and memorization actually is a pretty useful skill and is probably helping with her development. But memorizing the alphabet song, and even being able to correctly identify most letters, is not the same as knowing all the letters and the sounds they make and being able to sound out words. Like those are extremely different stages of development.

Anyway, there's a big difference between a kid memorizing a sequence or even memorizing the names we assign to different things and really "knowing" what those words mean. I'm guessing that's a big reason you see such broad variation in answers too -- people perceive this stuff very differently.[/quote]

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