If you have a toddler, there are high chances of you being worried about further growth and development of your child. Amongst many responsibilities as a parent of a toddler, how to teach alphabets or how to teach letter sounds can be a few of them. Alphabet training is one of the most important grooming habits for a toddler. It helps the kid to recognize sounds, how to write alphabets, and how to read them. Alphabet training at the right age in the right way also helps the child to grow academically. Otherwise, the letter-oriented knowledge that children own remains rusted and unrecognized. Children must be able to learn letter literacy and word recognition. Let us see how to teach a child to write English alphabets to preschoolers and toddlers.
What Is Letter Recognition And Why It Is Important?
The process of letter-recognition involves two major things:
- Distinguishing between the different alphabets of English vocabulary
- Pronouncing the letters
Why Is It Necessary for Children To Learn Letter Recognition?
- Kids who know and recognize letter names can easily understand the associated alphabet sounds
- Children who can easily name the letters turn out to be better and quicker readers as compared to the ones who fail to identify letter names
- The children who can recognize letters can learn more names and even start forming letters on their own. This increases their creative writing skills
How To Teach Alphabets To Toddlers and Preschoolers?
1. Read Alphabet Books
The habit of reading has proven to be the quickest way to imbibe the letters, its sounds and recognition into the minds of your kids. The repetition of words while reading will process the words, their pronunciation and letter-sound into the babies’ minds.
2. Use Sandpaper Letters
Using sandpaper is an excellent way to introduce letters to children. It makes a perfect pre-writing activity because children use their fingers to trace and remember the alphabets and letters.
3. Try Alphabet Puzzles
Alphabet puzzles are a very fun activity to teach the alphabets to kindergarten. Puzzles make it a non-monotonous activity filled with fun and knowledge and hence it intrigues younger kids, making it the absolute best source of infotainment.
4. Indulge In Sensory Activities
Sensory activities include pictorial or visual representation along with recital so that children can easily learn and understand. Visuals always give better understanding than audio and hence, using this technique can lead in quicker learning of alphabets and sounds.
5. Play Alphabet Scavenger Hunt
This is a fun game which includes letting children pick-up and find objects starting from different letters. This would not only help in learning letters but also explore objects that make use of those letters. This is one of the creatively intriguing ways of how to teach your child to recognize the letters of the alphabet.
7. Go With An Alphabet Journal
Alphabet journaling is a different and unique kind of journaling in which kids can make use of stickers, paints, sketch pens, colours, newspapers, magazines and cut out the words from each letter as many as possible. This will increase their creativity and help them innovatively discover new words.
8. Sing The ABC Song
Sing entire the ABC song, with tune same as twinkle twinkle little star. This helps the children to resonate with you and the letters faster and hence, helps them to pick up the letters and alphabet sounds quickly.
9. Work With ABC Exercise Cards
You can make use of ABC exercise cards to print each alphabet and ask children to randomly pick one card and draw an object that starts from that letter. This is one of the most effective techniques of knowledge reinforcement.
Toddlers
There is a possibility that if your child is a toddler (about 2-3 years old), he/she may sing alphabets and still fail to recognize them separately. Studies suggest that about 20% of children can identify only those letters which are contained in their name. The reason for this can also be traced to the fact that their names are repeated and are hence, registered and reinforced into their minds. And if you observe, you’ll notice that their random scribbles would have most probably started looking like the initials of their names.
Now that you have discovered that your child’s brain has started developing and inclining towards the literacy aspect, start singing alphabetical songs and start playing word games with them to provide them with the needed competency in the same. You can start with randomly picking an object and asking them what letters comprise it. This would create an informative environment at home.
Preschoolers
By the time kids reach the age of 4, more than 60% of children have already learnt almost half of the uppercase alphabets and 10-12 lowercase alphabets as well. Preschoolers can sense and observe letters in their environment and amusingly discover that letters are related to sounds and this gives birth to a new insight which is commonly known as the alphabetic principle. They start noticing the difference in numbers and letters and similarity in some letters like p and q, b and d, n and u. For instance, they observe that these letters if rotated either on vertical or horizontal axes would give the corresponding other. This age is an age of creative and critical development.
Squirt the letter and trash can alphabet review are some of the fun games that preschool teachers consider playing so that they can introduce these kids to a higher level of word-oriented knowledge. This also helps them participate actively and cultivate their creative instincts.
The toddler age is the one where a kid can learn and explore many things and discover their creative abilities. Therefore, it is important to concatenate this creativity with the alphabet training so that learning doesn’t become a burden. It is important to make use of more artistically motivating sources like videos, fun games, puzzles, alphabet hunt, alphabet tree, etc. to help children learn alphabets and cultivate their knowledge around words, sounds, literacy-based intellect. There are many online and offline sources of information which can be used. This would make sure the desired growth of your students and kids without monotonality.