Are you humming the Alphabet Song as you go to sleep at night? If you have a pre-school child, the answer may be, "Not yet."

Now that, like many other states, California has adopted standards to measure what our kids are learning, even the little ones are affected.

For example, the State Department of Education and your local school system now offers a guarantee that, before first grade, your kid:

• Identifies the front cover, back cover, and title page of a book
• Follows words from left to right and from top to bottom of the printed page
• Understands that printed materials provide information
• Recognizes that sentences in print are made up of separate words
• Tells the difference between letters and words
• Recognizes and names all uppercase and lowercase letters of the alphabet
• Identifies the individual sound of letters
• Blends vowel-consonant sounds orally to make words or syllables
• Identifies rhyming words
• Hears and identifies beginning or ending sounds
• Auditorialy tracks each word in a sentence and each syllable in a word
• Counts the number of syllables in a word
• Matches all consonant and short vowel sounds to appropriate letters
• Reads simple one-syllable/high frequency words and a minimum of 10 sight words
• Understands that as letters of words change, so do the sounds
• Identifies and sorts common objects (colors, shapes, foods)
• Describes common objects and events in both general and specific language
• Locates title, name of author, name of illustrator
• Uses pictures and context to make predictions about story
• Connects to life experiences the information and events in stories
• Retells familiar stories
• Asks and answers questions about main idea, characters, setting in a text
• Knows real from non-real (fiction) stories
• Knows kinds of print materials (storybooks, poems, newspapers, signs, labels)
• Identifies characters, settings and important event
• Uses alphabet letters to write
• Writes three letter words with consonant, vowel, consonant pattern (cat, pig)
• Writes by moving from left to right and top to bottom
• Writes first and last name

Impressed? The relatives will be, too, when they see what the kid can do. They always knew that she/he was a genius. They know where she got it from, too.

But yes, you can expect notes from school, with suggestions about what should be done at home, even in kindergarten.

Almost every kid has stories to tell, and favorite books to retell. You might have fun using a tape-recorder. Then draft an aunt or a grandma to transcribe the story, show the kid how it looks in print, and read it aloud.

There are a lot of ways using the alphabet can be fun too, and lots of things in the stores like magnets for the fridge, alphabet calendars, picture books organized around letters.

Last resort? Buy a tape of the alphabet song. Then make a blank tape with just that song, sixty minutes' worth. Play it each day, and your kid will learn the alphabet. As a matter of fact, you'll be hearing it as you go to sleep at night. Count on it.