How do you help your three year old learn his/her letters? He can say the full ABC’s. And to learn what they look like we play a game when in the store of find the letter of the week. (sometimes its longer than a week) What other games does everyone play to help with learning the letters?
cj
One thing which helped a lot in the beginning was having those foam tile mats with letters on them. You could play a game of finding a letter and stepping on it first.
If you are not adverse to letting your child watch videos I strongly suggest
The Letter Factory" by leap frog. After watching it 5 times or so my son knew all his letters and soon after that mastered their sounds. Also the starfall website “Learn your Letters” portion is great.
Yep. starfall is great. I also have those foam letters for the bathtub. You can also get the magnetic letters and get a magnetic board.
Hi there Plnkkylemichael,
One thing that helped us was to do the activities in conjunction with the letter of the week. Eg. with the letter Aa we planted apple seeds, did apple prints with paint, we made apricot jam and apple pie. This I found gave a good grounding in letter recognition. Also singing - keep singing the alphabet song. I think that there are two different ones in the downloads. Just recently our son has got the l,m,n,o,p bit correct - he always seemed to say his own little thing when it got to that point.
I did read somewhere in one post that it’s actually not encouraged to teach the alphabet first, but rather to teach whole words and then the alphabet? Maybe someone else knows a little more on this?
TABS
On the YBCR early learning DVD Robert Titzer teaches that it is better to teach a combination of whole words and phonics before teaching letters.
Mainly because individual letters have no meaning until they are used in a word. Once the child knows whole words you can introduce the individual letters because then you can explain the letters in the context of the word and how the letter sounds.
I hope this helps
I totally agree. We never taught the alphabet until much later, when she was already able to read many words.
Once she has already seen those ‘symbols’ so often (from learning words), it’s much easier to learn what these things are called and the sound of them since they are something that’s already familiar, not to mention if they have already been intuiting the phonic rules, a lot of what you then teach them about alphabets would also make a lot of sense and be much easier to teach.
(gosh, hope i made sense there! :laugh: )
thanks those are great ideas I wish I had the foam letters but we can not find them here in Itlay. I will not worry then about teaching him letter names and will just work on reading since he seems to enjoy learning to do that. Thanks for all the information.
CJ
I always prefer teaching the sound of the letter and short vowels first before the name of the letter if the kid is small (2-3). My younger ones learned their alphabet song from Richard Scarry’s cartoons, so they like to sing it.
Plaster of Paris mold set is nice. We paint it and put in order as we sing. If they break, we glue or make some more :clown:
I think a letter a week is too slow. We tackled all vowels at once.