ABC Song vs Recognizing Letters

Children generally begin to sing the alphabet song, when prompted, when they are around age three (Zettler-Greeley, 2018). If your child hasn’t learned the alphabet song yet it may be best that you start here. However, they don’t need to know the song before learning to recognize their letters as shown by my youngest daughter’s experience with learning to recognize her ABCs.

Every parent wants to watch their child progress, especially when they are toddlers. It’s quite fascinating actually. Therefore, I came up with the idea of teaching my older daughter the letters of the alphabet because, at the age of two, she only had a three to four word vocabulary. I thought that if she wasn’t going to speak anytime soon that this could be an exciting alternative. It worked out really well, was a lot of fun and even my husband got in on the game once she had learned a couple of letters, so make sure you keep reading to learn how we did it. It was a little more difficult for my second daughter as her sister would often want to help. However, both kids ended up learning their alphabet by around age three, which led us to the next step: letter sounds (but this will come later).

When they are around age three, they start recognizing the first letter of their name, and their recognition of symbols increases as they reach age four (Zettler-Greeley, 2018). However, if you use the following techniques you can have your child recognizing most, if not all, of the letters by age three.

How to Teach

To help increase the rate at which they recognize letters and therefore, increase their chances of success in school you can start teaching them to recognize their ABCs as soon as they start walking through the use of an alphabet mat, letter fridge magnets or letter blocks.

You can set the mat or the blocks up in your child’s room or you can put the letters on the fridge. Then, when you’re in your house and you’re going about your day you can teach your child to recognize their letters. For example, when you’re showing pictures to your child, what’s the difference in asking “Where’s the cow?”, expecting them to point to the image of a cow, and asking them “Go get an ‘M’ for Mommy?” and them running to get the letter “M” from their room or the fridge.

You should begin with capital letters as they are typically easier to learn (Zettler-Greeley, 2018). Now, when choosing letters make sure you start with the letters that stand for important names such as the first letter of their own name, “M” for Mommy, “D” for Daddy, “B” for baby (if you have a baby in the house too), and “G” for Grandma. This is important as one of the first letters children learn to recognize is the first letter of their own name, and so the association between their own name and the names of others is important in the learning process. After you have gone through all of the important names, there aren’t many letters left to learn.

Important Information

When starting out, an important thing to do is to put out two or three letters to start so that the letter in question is easy to find. Then, run down to the room together until they know which letter to pick. Once your child knows a few of the letters, add a couple of new ones. Before you know it, they will know all of their uppercase letters. After capital letters have been mastered then lowercase letters can be added. Many lowercase letters are similar to their uppercase counterparts so this process will go much faster. Additionally, numbers 0-9 can be included and they are generally part of the letter sets that you can buy.

Conclusions

To easily incorporate this into your daily activities you can “play the game” each night while making dinner or relaxing in front of the TV as this is not a time-consuming task. The entire nightly experience may last anywhere from one to five minutes. The most important part of the experience is consistency and fun; don’t make this learning experience work for your child, know their limits. If you make this part of your nighttime routine and make it an enjoyable quest, you should be quite successful. You’ll find that your child will start remembering the letters and at the same time delight in running down to their room to grab the letter to bring to you.

Do you have any other ways you’re teaching (or you’ve taught) your child to recognize their ABCs? I’d love to hear some more, please let me know in the comments!

References

Zettler-Greeley, C. M. (Ed.). (2018, June). Reading Milestones (for Parents). Retrieved June 2019, from https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/milestones.html