You NEED those ABCs!

These last two weeks I've been organizing closets, especially my hall closet. My hall closet has a couple ordinary things you would find, but most of it is filled with activity bins and educational materials for my boys. In all of those things, I found at least 3 ABC type toys. That got me curious and I started to count all the ABC type toys I had in my house. I'm talking like separate letters such as letter blocks, foam letters, magnets, puzzles, etc. In a short time, I counted 8. I'm sure I probably have more. To some or many, that may seem excessive, but I disagree.

You start out in PreK needing to know your letters if you haven't already. It is reinforced in kindergarten followed with some sight words and phonics. By first grade, you are starting to read and by second you have spelling words and vocabulary words that follow you all the way through sixth grade.

ALPHABET LETTERS ARE A BIG PART OF YOUR CHILD'S EDUCATION.

Starting with teaching what the letters are, you should work in this step order:

1. Letter Identification (captitals)

2. Letter Identification (lowercase) [#2 and #3 can be switched]

3. Letter sounds [#2 and #3 can be switched]

4. Start early sight or first word recognition (a, an, the, at, cow, dog, cat, etc.)

5. Rhyming words by sound and sight (cat, bat, sat, rat)

6. Letter blends (ch, ed, th, br, tr, th, etc.)

7. Continue larger sight words as they progress and introduce spelling the words

Even as they get further into elementary school, keep those letters! Children that tend to be more tactile learners or kinesthetic need to touch and manipulate the letters for spelling. Writing or saying the words aloud may not be enough for them to learn. So instead of just asking your child to spell the word out for you, let them use their letter blocks, magnets, etc. to spell out the word for you. When they are working on making sentences, let them form the sentence with their letters. Not only will it be teaching them in a different style that may be better for their learning style, it won't feel like your forcing them in a traditional classroom style writing down each word or sentence on paper with a pencil.

Whether you print out my freebies to use as letters or buy them from a store, I HIGHLY encourage you to get letters for your child. Don't just get one set either. Capitals, lowercase, and more than one set is recommended so you avoid the problem of not having enough letters to spell words or make sentences that uses a letter more than once. Don't worry about buying all of the specialized ABC toys either, you can do so much more with the basics.

Letters are cheap, but your child's education is worth everything.