How to Teach the Alphabet to Preschoolers
Since we do Montessori at home, we follow the Montessori approach in teaching the alphabet to my son. In Montessori, instead of teaching the names of the letters, they introduce the letter sounds first to the child. So that means I introduced my son to different phonetic activities while he’s learning the alphabet.
Phonic Activities we
love :
We played the Sound Game
Before my son even begins to recognize letters we were already practicing the sound game on a daily basis. He was around 2.5 to 3 years old then. I would emphasize the beginning sounds of some words while I was talking to him. Mostly, I focus on the words that he’s having difficulty enunciating correctly.
My son became so used to that activity that it became normal for us to talk like /w/ water (wwwater). It may sound funny especially if you are new to the process but it’s actually very helpful once the child shows interest in letters.
Sometimes we also play the I Spy game. We would take turns identifying things around us that start with a certain letter sound. Again emphasizing the beginning sounds.
When my son became fully interested in letters he was around 3.5 years old. First, he would ask me about the letters on the cover of his book and I would tell him the letter sounds. Since he’s already familiar with some of the letters sounds it became easy for him to remember them.
We started with lowercase letters
In Montessori, they teach the child the lowercase letters first because most reading and writing materials are written in lowercase letters. Therefore, the child sees more lowercase letters than capital letters. With that said it is only fitting to teach the child the lowercase letters first.
We use the Montessori Sandpaper Letters
Montessori believe that “What the hand does, the mind remembers”. Therefore it will be easier for the child to remember the letters if they experience touching them hence the use of sandpaper letters.
We are using the
Shopee / Lazada version of the sandpaper letters, they are a little small but do
the job for us. If you have the budget then go ahead and buy the real
Montessori version they said the letters are bigger. I must also add that there
are different ways to DYI the sandpaper letters and you can easily find
tutorials online.
We use a sound book
What is a sound book you may ask? Well, it’s a small book where you can write the letters that you are confident your child had already mastered.
Since my son likes to study with all the letters at the same time it’s kind of hard for me to remember which letter sounds he already mastered. So I decided to add a sound book to our alphabet kit. He can also scan the pages of the sound book if he wants to review his letters.
Soundbook is easy to make, you can just use some cutout papers or cardboard according to your preference. For ours, I used letter-size cardboard papers and cut it into four equal parts and then bind them together with a string/yarn.
We did a lot of beginning phonic sound activities
We took our time learning the alphabet. My son works with his letters for months and months and we did a lot of activities to help him master the letter sounds.
We used some language objects for our phonic activities but later on, Jarvis became more interested in working on some pictures that I print out.
Around the time that he is so interested in letters, he’s also interested in animals (well until now he is still on animal craze). So I took the opportunity to use animals in most of our phonic beginning sounds activities.
He really likes the Alphabet Animals and Phonic Activity I created especially for him but now available in my shop. He would also spend so much time working on them.
Another thing he really likes is the Alphabet Birds and Phonic Activity it's really fascinating to observe how he concentrates on completing these activities. He normally works with them independently as well.
At this point, my son already mastered the sounds of all the letters in the alphabet. He already knows the name of the letters and he also mastered the correct sequence of the alphabet on his own. In addition, he can also match the capital and lowercase letters.
I encouraged him several times to write some CVC words and he obliged but later lost his interest so I did not insist because I know the right opportunity will come. In the meantime, I am giving him more beginning sound phonic activities like our Phonics Activity Cards to keep him going.
I can say that my son learns the alphabet effortlessly. All I did was prep him without him even realizing we were prepping by doing sound games and I Spy games, wait for him to be ready and interested then prepared the environment and provide materials that will assist him through his success of learning the alphabet.
If you find this helpful please don't forget to share and you may follow me on my social media to know more about the activities we do for our homeschooling. Thank you for being here.
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