My daughter has a book which has the ABCs with Sesame Street characters and when she was about 18 months old I started making it part of our nightly book reading before bed. I just assumed she was too young to understand them or learn to recognize the letters until a couple of months later we were at the bank and she pointed to a sign and said all the letters.

I think the key here was the repetition (we read it every night for several months) but obviously she was a captive audience when we would read the book. Once she made the connection between the Sesame Street book and the ABC song which many of her toys play/sing, she became very eager to learn the song too.

Leapfrog's Letter Factory was what resonated with my kids. The good news is that it teaches phonetics in addition to recognizing letters. But learning to say your alphabet is a different animal than learning to write and you'll soon be encountering that problem.

To that end, I'd highly recommend the Montessori sandpaper letters and moveable alphabet materials. Even if you don't subscribe to the Montessori approach, they're very useful in this situation.

Have you tried Here Come the ABCs? Our kids love it - I don't know whether it particularly helped them or not, but I can't see how it could have hurt :)

Our local nursery uses Jolly Phonics which you may find useful too. Does your preschool use any specific material? Reinforcing what she's learning there would be a good approach.

I got my daughter a Care Bear that "sings" the ABC song. We would let her play with that and would sing it to her in the car. Since she loves to sing, she was eager to learn the song. Once she had it down, we would get the magnets lined up or write out the alphabet and point to each letter as we sang.

We also got her Dr. Seuss' ABCs and VeggieTales: Bob and Larry's ABCs. She's also a bookworm, and a big VeggieTales fan, so those books went over very well.

I think the main trick is to keep it fun for her and not make it seem like a chore.

Music, music, music. We have 3 or 4 different versions of the ABC song that we could sing, including one from a PBS show that she really likes (Super Why).