Of all the skills that we learn in preschool, letter recognition seems to be the one that our parents worry about the most. We see how quickly our students dive into reading and writing in Kindergarten and we know that it adds to the pressure of learning those letters in preschool. For our parents that are working on skills at home this summer, we applaud your efforts! Letter recognition is a difficult skill for our kiddos to grasp. There are so many other skills that lead up to learning our letters. These abstract symbols hold very little meaning for children at first. Below, you will some ideas to help make letters more meaningful to children, which will help them to learn to recognize and identify individual letters. Then they will be ready to move on to the next step, which is combining these letters to make words!
How to Help Your Child Learn their Letters
Read. Read. And then read some more. Reading to your child on a daily basis is the best way to introduce letters. Through books, your child will start to make the connection between letters and words and ideas!
Make note of environmental print. The words on signs are a great place to start. By learning that S-T-O-P on that sign means that we must stop, we just made the connection that letters form words, and those words are a way of communicating information. Talk about the letters and practice identifying them when you see a stop sign. Soon your child will know them on their own!
Start with the letters in their own names. These letters are meaningful to them and they will be excited to learn their names. Shuffle up the letters and have your child identify each letter and place them in the correct order. Hang the letters up in your living room and run around pointing to each letter while naming it.
You can teach one letter at a time to your child, but it does not have to be done in alphabetical order. Use your daily experiences to make this a meaningful lesson. If your child is excited about a trip to the zoo, practice the letter Zz. If your child has discovered a newfound live of bugs, practice the letter Bb.
Have fun! No one enjoys writing letters over and over again on a handwriting page as a way of practicing letters, Incorporate your letter work into games and play. I remember playing a game with my own children when we would eat at restaurants. We had to find each letter of the alphabet on the menu. This later expanded to road signs on long car trips. They only remember playing fun games, but I know we were learning. Find a way to make letters fun for your child.
