Fun ways to teach the alphabet to children
Learning to speak starts at birth but once your child is talking the next challenge is introducing the concept of the alphabet. This is an obvious early childhood learning stage but how to do it and when to start? Of course, by simply talking to our babies from day one we are already educating them on the sounds of language as well as stimulating them with visual and physical interaction. As parents we intuitively know how important this is but there is also a huge volume of academic research that corroborates our intuition.
The research tells us that it is important to make physical contact with our babies and this is done immediately on birth these days by placing the new born on to the mother’s chest, or onto the father if the mother can’t do it in that moment. Shortly after the baby takes its first feed the Dads often step in to take the swaddled new born into their arms. A moment of sheer joy, and relief... Eye contact is also important as is an overall expressive face when talking to babies. Research also points to the importance of baby speak, that is the exaggerated speaking that Dads are often not so good at… This has been shown to be important for brain development and improved language skills at an early age.
One thing that the research says that may not be so intuitive, and where the Dads can regain some ground maybe, is the importance of using adult speech as well. This is especially important as the children become toddlers and begin to speak in coherent phrases and with correct pronunciation of words, as opposed to their early baby speak. It may be beneficial to refer to the things they use baby speak for by returning the correctly pronounced word back to them, without correcting them, as children understand words before they can speak them properly.
In our own case our son used to refer to aeroplanes as “Ahta” and helicopters as “Otto” and you can just about discern the onomatopoeic differential in that. We found it adorable of course and didn’t try to correct him as such but we did reply using aeroplane and helicopter and received affirmative signals. Soon enough he shed the baby speak for the correct verbalisation. Something irretrievably lost but something better gained. Such is the sometimes bitter sweet job of parenting…
In terms of more formal or conscious training, we started with flash cards and online educational videos. By the age of one and a half our toddler was already interested in simple online videos and preferred these to television, and still does even at the age of four and this is likely due to the measure of self-selection control he gains with online videos (see our series covering the UNESCO report on How children learn). The simple online videos introducing ABCs and especially the song versions are useful to capture our little wrigglers imagination and attention. Often you observe them mouthing the words silently and soon thereafter they are speaking them out loud and testing what they have learned with you. It’s quite astonishing really!
Once they can say all or most of the letters and recognise some of the items that start with each letter from the flash cards you can introduce some more interactive teaching tools. There are a wide range of such tools and toys available. In our case we used three types of interactive tools with slightly different mechanism. We had a wooden letter board with large colourful letters that fitted into a recess on the board and within the recess there was a painted item that began with that letter and the written word. We also used a simple A-Z jigsaw in the form or a train to demonstrate the order of the alphabet (see above). A little later on we introduced a picture to letter matching game. We played these games over and over and supplemented this with other ABC orientated teaching videos. Once our son had a good grasp of the alphabet and could recite it and sing the songs, we were ready to move on to Phonics, but that’s another story (see Phonics – what's all the fuss about? for more on this)
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