Saturday 12 November 2011

Creative Ways to Teach Your Child the Alphabet


Parents always bother that how they should teach their children alphabet. Of course, you had to throw in lots of patience too. The patience bit has remained unchanged across generations, but a few new teaching tools to help with alphabets and numbers have come into the picture. But, there are a lot of techniques through which the children can be taught alphabets. Read this article and it will help you know how to teach children alphabets step by step, and it will save much more of your time and energy, teaching your kids.  
1. An Alphabet Book
Buy an Alphabet Book and help your kids learn through it. Along with this, you can purchase a blank book from a stationery shop or an online store and you can ask him to write the letter or ask your child to find the letter in an old magazine and cut it out and paste it in this blank book. The best way is to give your kids a slate and a dustless chalk so that whatever they write on the slate can be erased and cleared for the next time writing practice. Besides this you also can cut out pictures from an old coloring book or magazine that has words that start with the letter on the page and paste them on the relevant page. You can also create a colorful collage and can ask your child to identify the alphabets from the alphabet collage. Your child will love doing this!
2. Play the ABC game
This is a very easy and fun way to teach your child the alphabet. Whenever you drive or walk anywhere with your child play the ABC game. Ask your child find the letter ‘A’ on billboards, or license plates, hoardings or signs. Start with the letter A and then look for letter B, C, etc. Similar pattern play can be used for number learning also. Once you finish the alphabet you can play again and again.
3. Sing the Alphabet Song
Children love to sing and what would be a better song to sing than the Alphabet Song. Good songs bounce around in a learner's mind long after their lesson is over. Start your day off along with your child with a song or two and be sure to include the ABC song.
4. Play the Alphabet Memory Game
For playing the alphabet memory game you can buy flashcards of the alphabet (Early Learning ABC 52 Flash Cards consisting pictures and letters). Ask your child to match the capital letter “A” to the lowercase letter “a”. Or you also can start with letters that are all in lowercase or all in capital form. Each time your child matches the letters ask him to pronounce what letter it is.
5. Make an Alphabet Photo collage
Ask your child to search in the newspaper and magazines the alphabets A or B, or whichever letter you choose and cut them out with scissors. When he is done with cutting out the alphabet’s picture let him glue them onto a collage. Tell him to write or trace the letter for your photo collage onto a chart paper and glue the pictures around with the help of glue stick. Children love doing this sort of things and this is a lot of fun.
6. Make an Alphabet finger painting
Use a chart paper and make a finger painting with different alphabets. Now ask your child to paint the capital letter and lowercase letter. Let him color it with color pencils or crayons in whatever colors he likes. It will be a real fun for him and an easy way to learn the alphabets.
7. Play the Alphabet Hide Away Game
Fill a bag with different objects that start with different letter sounds. For example, you could fill it with a toy car, a book, a pencil, an apple, a doll, an egg, etc. Show the child all the items before putting them in the bag. Then put all the items back in the bag. Now ask him to find the items by touching them only according to the objects name. Say can you find something that starts with the letter “A”? Then see if he can find and pick out the apple from the bag just by touching. This game is not only good for learning letters and sounds but also helps them with using their senses and tactile skills.
8. Use alphabets pictures in scrapbooks and Bedroom Door
Ask your child to cut the alphabets used in his name and then paste them on his scrapbook to spell out his name correctly. Children love to mark their own territory with their name on their bedroom door! You can ask him to paste these letters on his bed room door or on his cup board, and he will do it delightfully. Or else you can also cut the alphabets used in his name and then ask him to arrange them according to his name.
9. Arranging the Flash Cards to spell out child’s name
If your child’s name is such that it do not contain any single letter twice in his name you can ask him to pick out the letters of his name from the flash card pack and arrange them in the order which can read out his name. It will be fun for your child. Similarly you can ask him/her to arrange the flash card alphabets to name of his siblings, mother, father or his/her friend. You can also ask him to arrange the cards to spell out simple words like dog, bat, cat, rat, map, cap, pin, pet, tap, cow, pig, hat, box, van, fan, hen, ring, bin, home, hut, etc. This will help your child learn forming simple words.
10. Alphabet scramble
Take a set of alphabet cards and choose a combination which makes a word appropriate for your child's age. Scramble them up and ask your child to put them in the right order. This game can be made more exciting and energetic by "hiding" the cards around the room and telling the child how many cards he has to find. It is also a fun team game: use two different sets of alphabet cards and the kids will have great fun running around each other trying to find where their cards are hidden without giving away cards to the other team! Or you also can ask your child to match the alphabetic card with its related picture in other cards.
11. Which letter is missing?
For this game first lay out a set of ABC cards in alphabetical order. Ask your child to close his eyes and while the he closes his eyes, take one card away. Now ask him to open his eyes and identify which letter is missing.
12. Alphabetical sort
Simply shuffle up a set of alphabet cards and put them back into order as quickly as possible. Same can be done with the number cards. It is really a fun when two or three children are playing same game with different set of cards. It will help children identify and arrange the alphabets quickly and correctly.
13. Change a letter
Select a word and find the correct letters to assemble for your child from the pack of the flash cards. Challenge them to change the word to another by swapping one letter at a time. For example, change "cat" to “cap” (by replacing letter “t” with “p”), “cap” to “car” (by replacing “p” to “r”), "cot" to "cop" and so on. It will be a real fun and a very good medium to make your child learn spelling out the simple things or objects.


Please leave your valuable comments about the article, whether it was really helpful or not. Or if you want to suggest any other method please feel free to write.

1 comment:

  1. Great Article....and great blog I would say. It is really very much helpful for parents like me. I saw your website as well its quite good enough no doubt, but still it is lacking with so many things and most of the images are not very good, and many things are out of stock. I would like to buy a few learning devices for my 3 year old son. However, I read most of the articles on your blog, which gave me real insights to teach kids with ease. I would again say thanks a lot allschoolstuff. Keep parents like me updating on new techniques to teach kids.

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