Teaching Children ABC's: A Guide for Parents

I am often reminded that parents need guidance and encouragement when they are helping their children learn at home.  Here are tips you can share with moms and dads, grannies and uncles, friends of young children to support what you do in preschool.  Many of these have adaptations for the classroom as well.  Feel free to share the link to this blog in your next email to families or electronic newsletter.  Publishing the full content with a "cut and paste" from this blog is prohibited, without permission from the author (me!)

First, always remember that the interaction you offer your child with letters of the alphabet should be meaningful and not just isolated memory tasks.  Make it fun and playful, not a structured lesson or drill.  Begin with uppercase letters, as they are easier for children to recognize.  Most print occurs in both upper and lower case so you may choose to teach both, according to the abilities of your child.  Let your child help you see which is best for them.

• Go on a letter hunt! Watch your child as he interacts with his world and everything in it. Letters are everywhere! Does he notice certain signs and logos, such as "exit" signs, store or restaurant logos? When he does, point out and name letters with him. Start with the first letter of a word.   Pick a letter of the alphabet and look for it everywhere it might be.  You can hunt in the house, while driving in the car (street and store signs), down the hall at the preschool or the store, letters are everywhere!

• The importance of our name. Help your child learn to recognize her own name and the letters that spell it. Begin by showing your child her whole name in print. Maybe you print her name on a sign for her door or the refrigerator. You can also put name labels on her backpack, lunchbox, or on a nameplate or inside the covers of her favorite books.  Don't just label everything for the sake of letters; it will make them "visual white noise" rather than showing print as meaningful.  Show your daughter her name on mail like doctor appointment reminders, calendars, or junk mail.

To help your child learn the letters in her name, write it slowly, saying each letter aloud as you print. Then encourage her to copy the letters. The best way to help your child learn how to write at this age is to involve her in activities that help her feel large motions of writing. Squiggles are OK.

• Playing with Magnetics Once your child has a small bank of letters he can easily recognize (maybe letters from his name and those he sees in his world), play with magnetic letters on the refrigerator or even simple blocks. Arrange them to say the names of other family members or spell simple words or words your child is interested in. Pick up on words your child is using (milk, hand, toes, etc.).  You can even make your own "play" letters out of cardboard (old cereal boxes are easy to use for this - the reverse/inside with no print). 

Whenever you and your child are playing and learning, encourage and be positive, know that learning letters or many other things takes time and that your child should improve over time.  If you don't see improvement as you think should happen, talk it over with your child's preschool teacher or someone who has studied early childhood development (even your pediatrician).  They can help you understand what is normal for your child.

A friendly checklist for literacy development can be found in Anytime Reading Readiness, a book for parents of 3-6 year olds from Maupin House Publishing.

Getting A Perspective on Literacy as A Part of the Overall Growth of A Child

Certainly literacy is an essential and often focused upon topic when it comes to early childhood. Whether we are reading favorite books like Nancy Carlson's Look Out Kindergarten, Here I Come! or exposing children to rich conversations about language and letters, we are building important skills. However, as I travel the country and visit preschools, I sometimes see an out-of-balance, isolated instruction focus that concerns me.


RESEARCH IS OUR GUIDE

Young children learn best in exploratory, playful environments.  The guidelines from the findings of the National Early Literacy Panel can be used within that context and that's how you will gain the best results.

This group met first in 2002 and was charged with identifying from a review of high-quality research the areas essential for later reading proficiency. These guidelines were released in 2009 and can help us focus on what will bring identifiable results and pave the way for children to learn to read at their prime time.

Six Early Skills Predictive of Later Literacy Achievement

Alphabetic Knowledge
Phonological Awareness
Rapid Automatic Naming of Letters and Digits
Rapid Automatic Naming of Colors and or Objects
Writing or Writing Name
Phonological Memory

Let's look at the first one. ALPHABETIC KNOWLEDGE.

See the girls to the right? They aren't readers yet in the conventional sense but they are exploring that book. The girl on the left is pointing to a letter and they are discussing it.

Don't think strict lesson, sitting at tables or responding to flash cards while children squirm because they are being asked to sit longer than their natural attention span allows.

Instead, think of how you can teach these skills in a playful environment.  These girls just sat down with a book and, in fact, had just been prompted by the teacher to look for letters they knew.

Learning the alphabet can really be facilitated through such positive experiences and games.

Explore the shapes in sand or with sponges on the sidewalk.

Let children feel the letter as they draw their fingers over them.

Sing the ABC song with them while hopping from one letter to another on the floor or ground.

Have a game where children can walk quickly to the other end of the room and pick up a letter that they know, bring it back to you and tell you the name (it can be a race but be careful of untied shoes!)

As you take dictation for them, on artwork or notepaper or wherever, show them how you write that letter of focus and allow them to try the same.

Consistently point out letters you want to emphasize when they appear in print you are sharing with the children (big books, individual or circle time stories, posters on the wall, street signs, and print throughout your center).

As children become more familiar with more letters, you can have all kinds of hunting and finding games to reinforce their rapid recall and identification.  We want them to be able to quickly name any letter we point to eventually and they will be able to do that when they reach a level of automaticity (quick delivery) of the names of letters.

Letter of the week is fine but make sure you aren't drilling the children.  Think of this cool progression: FRIG


Familiarity and exposure to seeing the letters in lots of different contexts
Recognition - children begin to associate the letter shape with its name
Identification - children can point out the letter when you say "show me" or "where is the A?"
Generation - children can look at a letter and say its correct name

This progression from strong support and modeling through limited support to independent mastery is evident in most anything your children learn.

Next time we'll talk about phonological awareness.

Have fun!