Teaching the ABCs
As a teacher and a mum, I get asked often about how to teach early literacy effectively. If you are into research feel free to read from the top. If you are time poor or happy to blindly believe what I say, then feel free to skip right down to ‘my recommendations in a nut shell’.
I understand that some parents have no desire to teach their children basic literacy before school age and thats a personal parenting choice. If this is you then don’t waste your time; this is not the blog for you.
If you do get something out of this blog and want to say thanks via caffeine then you can shout me a coffee here.
Why early introduction is important
It is well documented that the years from birth through age 5 are a critical time for children’s development and learning. Children learn faster and most easily in this time compared to any other stage of their lives. According to research conducted by the National Institute for Literacy, learning to read should begin well before children enter school. This is partly due to the fact that children who develop more literacy skills prior to their formal schooling years perform better in the primary grades. Providing young children with the critical precursor skills to reading can offer a path to improving overall achievement.
It is important to remember that I’m not talking about teaching your three-year-old to read proficiently before they are five! When experts suggest introducing early literacy concepts between ages 1 and 4, what they are referring to is basic letter recognition and phonetic awareness. That is- ‘this is a D and D says duh’. Many parents feel overwhelmed with the thought of teaching phonics to their children but there is nothing to fear. Most toddlers can easily recognise and name countless animals, as well as the sounds they make; teaching letters is just as easy!
The goal of learning basic literacy skills in toddlerhood is not to be “good at school”, but rather to build confidence in learning, thus increasing the change of a smooth and positive start to their school experience. In other words, what we want to achieve is a love of learning by providing children with a strong foundation of understanding.
While it can be tempting to “leave it for the teachers,” It’s important to remember that when children begin their school journey it can be an incredibly overwhelming time. There are new people, new surroundings, new rules, new expectations and on top of managing all of this, they are expected to learn new concepts, in new ways, all in an environment where one-on-one help is an impracticality. Having some background understanding to give context and make connections to, can reduce anxiety and allow your child to build a positive experience of school. A confidence that they are capable and can be an active contributor in the learning process. This can make all the difference when it comes to a student’s perception of school. First impressions are important and if a child starts off school filled with confidence and excitement rather than confusion and stress, they are much more likely to love going to school, build healthy relationships while at school and reach their academic potential.
The fact that children’s language and literacy competence does not begin when children enter school, means parents are highly influential in building a child’s literacy skills. Indeed, research shows that the home literacy environment is the context in which children first acquire the language and literacy skills that equip them to make sense of, describe, and participate in the world (Liebeskind, Piotrowski, Lapierre, & Linebarger, 2014; Niklas & Schneider, 2013; Raikes et al., 2006). Teaching your child the basics at home, can be a pleasant bonding experience for you both. Once they enter the school system your child will realistically receive next to no high quality one on one time, so this time with you is incredibly special!
According to Newman, Ratner and Jusczyk (2006) language and literacy experiences in the first three years of life set the scene for children’s later literacy competencies, emphasising these experiences are critical. Not only do children with stronger early literacy skills tend to outperform children with weak early literacy skills on assessments of literacy abilities in school, this gap appears to widen rather than reduce over time (Bast & Reitsma, 1998; Torppa, Poikkeus, Laakso, Eklund, & Lyytinen, 2006). Put simply, once a child has fallen “behind” it is very difficult to catch up in a whole class environment.
But aren’t you scared they’ll get bored at school and disengage? Absolutely not! As a teacher of over a decade, the trend I have noticed in my classrooms correlates exactly to the research. That is, that weaker students disengage at a much higher rate compared to children who have a strong understanding. When a child feels confident in their knowledge they are more likely contribute in classroom discussions which helps cement their understandings further. When a child is learning something brand new with no background understanding they find it much harder to make links and are more likely to lose focus. Teachers will always meet students where they are at, whether a child requires extending or remediation, it is part of the teacher’s job to differentiate the curriculum appropriately.
What’s the best age to start?
If you take one thing away from reading this blog, let it be- meet your child where they are at. Sometimes our children spark an interest in letters or words at a much younger than we as parents expect. There is no harm in starting to introduce letter names and sounds as young as 18 months old. Young children are wired to learn and you often only have to tell them once or twice before they’ve got it. As they get older it becomes more challenging. Always remember the end goal is to foster a love of learning. Therefore, it is important not to force children into “learning experiences” that are unpleasant or stressful for the child. Learning in the early years is often unstructured, unplanned or play based. If you have not noticed an interest in letters form by 3 years old try incorporating it into your day to day conversations and play. Make letters fun!
Remember there is no ideal timeframe to pre-school literacy. Just like any other milestone, if your child is interested early, great! If they don’t show an interest until a bit later then there is nothing wrong with that either. Each child is on their own trajectory and all we can do as parents is give them opportunities to learn and grow along the way.
Upon entering school, children come with a range of skill levels and an even wider range of letter knowledge. Most have some experience with the alphabet through singing the alphabet song. Other kindergarteners can spell their names, read basic sight words and decode CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant- e.g. cat, mat, hat). It is a teacher’s job to differentiate and meet all students at their own ability level. It is your job to help give your child enough background knowledge to allow them to enjoy school and not become completely overwhelmed.
Names or sounds?
So, your child is showing an interest in letters but you are unsure of where to begin. Here is a crash course in basic literacy-
· Letter recognition is the ability to name letters, identify characteristics specific to said letter, and letter formation of all 26 uppercase and lowercase letter symbols used in the English language. That’s 52 letters total. It’s the equivalent of knowing a dog is a dog (remembering there are different breeds of dogs)
· Phonetic awareness is the understanding that letters each make different sounds. Some letters can make multiple sounds and when blended together letter sounds can alter (e.g. s, h, sh).
Letter recognition includes being able to differentiate between different letters and their shapes, and should be taught before, or at the very least, in conjunction with letter sounds. This means that letter recognition skills are important and should not be passed over for letter sound practice! Children need to know letter names as well as letter sounds to experience ease in learning how to read.
But wait, I’ve heard teachers say that teaching sounds is more important than names?
As a teacher and a parent, I can see how this can be confusing. Once a child gets to school age the emphasis often shifts from basic letter recognition and phonetic awareness and onto reading. To be able to read effectively you need to be able to sound out words. To be able to sound out words, you need to have phonetic proficiency. Simply put, if a child gets to an age where they still don’t have basic letter recognition teachers will prioritise phonics over recognition in order to speed up the learning to read process. This is a non-issue when talking about children under 5. There is no rush to start reading and therefore children can learn letters names first and then the sounds they make. This is the simplest and most logical way to teach and learn. If you can teach a toddler that, this is a dog, and dogs say “woof”, then you can teach them letter names and sounds!
The National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) meta-analysed 52 studies which connected alphabetic knowledge, (including letter recognition and sounds generation), with the later decoding ability of 7,570 kids and found a strong relationship between the two. Unsurprisingly, the more letter names the kids knew, the greater their later success in decoding. This study proves that knowing letter names is just as important as knowing their phonetic sound. So, no matter what you believe in regards to letters and letter names, “research has established that children who know the names of letters learn letter-sound associations more readily than those without letter-name knowledge.” (Words their Way for PreK-K, 2014).
Just in case I haven’t already convinced you, here are my top 3 reasons for teaching letter names first before moving onto sounds-
1. The majority of letter names give the child a huge clue as to the sound (or one of the sounds) they make. For example, the letter D has the /d/ sound at the beginning and the letter F has the /f/ sound at the end. W, Y, and H are the only three exceptions.
2. Letter names make great labels for letters, as many of the letter sounds are harder to make in isolation. For example, b’s sound in isolation tends to sound more like /buh/, which can make blending it with other letter sounds difficult for beginning readers.
3. Letter sounds are more abstract and aren’t as consistent as letter names. Take for example the A in Target. In my experience, it seems more consistent to say, “Oh, I see the letter A in Target,” than “I see an /a/ (short a sound) in Target…but it doesn’t make the /a/ sound. It makes the /r/ sound.” Huh?
In order to have true fluency in letter recognition, children must be able to identify letters and say their names in and outside of context and in and out of sequence. It’s not just accuracy, but also automaticity, which is being able to be accurate and fast at the same time, which contributes to later reading success.
Similarly, there can be some confusion about the order of which to teach letters. Teachers in a school environment will often adopt a “satpin” order. That is, for students with little to no prior knowledge they will prioritise high frequency letters first. The thinking is, if a child has phonetic understanding of the most common letters in the English language they will be able to read and write the more words in a faster timeframe. However, when considering a pre-school aged child, this rush to get them ‘reading ready’ is not a factor. Younger children will often learn letters faster and with more ease and therefore the normal alphabetic order can work even better. They can use their prior knowledge of the alphabet song, along with ‘abc’ books which most families have on their bookshelf, to form links to the new concepts being taught. Simple alphabet posters showing the standard order of letters can also be used in matching activities with magnetic letters. There is absolutely no need to seek out resources depicting a specific order of letters.
My recommendations in a nutshell
Research shows that early (before school age) introduction to basic literary concepts is important to future success
Teaching letter recognition and phonics (sounds) is as easy as teaching animals and the noises they make!
Teach letter names first (then sounds) in children under 5 but reverse for older children
Teach letters in standard order for children under 5 but use the ‘satpin’ order for older children who are beginning to read
The most important literacy skills to teach your child are-
Alphabet knowledge: Knowing about the names and sounds associated with printed letters.
Phonological awareness: Being able to detect, manipulate or analyse the auditory aspects of spoken language e.g. break words apart into smaller sound units (syllables or phonemes, adding or deleting sound units)
Rapid automatised naming: Being able to quickly name a sequence of random letters, numbers, objects and colours
Other important skills-
Writing letters: Writing letters in isolation on request or write own name (start with pre-writing tracing lines from the age of three)
Phonological memory: Remembering content of spoken language for a short period of time (ask your child questions to check comprehension of instructions)
Concepts about print: Knowing about print conventions (reading left-right, front-back) and concepts (book cover, author, text)
Oral language: Being able to produce or comprehend spoken language, including vocabulary or grammar
Visual processing: Being able to match or discriminate visually presented symbols
Sight words (high frequency words that cannot be sounded out)
How I did it-
Please remember that every child is different. Denzel may start earlier or later than Maisie, and so might your child. There is no ‘set’ age for early literacy introduction!
From nine months old we established a routine of reading bedtime stories.
At around 16 months Maisie began to show an interest in the letters and words on the page, often pointing them out. We introduced the alphabet song around this age. She had a alphabet painting in her room and we would point to the letters as we sang so she got the message that each word matched a picture.
At 18 months I started teaching her the names of the letters by using an alphabet book. At this age it was simple memorisation on the “story”.
By 20 months she knew letter names well and could identify them out of order. She enjoyed matching magnetic letters onto an alphabet poster I stuck onto the fridge. I began teaching her the letter sounds at this age by using the same method we used to teach animal sounds. I simply said, “what sound does A say? aaa” and so on. She very quickly picked it up. She really enjoyed watching ‘Letter Factory’ on Netflix around this age.
When we were in shopping centre carparks she enjoyed reading number plates as we walked past them. She also likes to point out letters on posters in the centre and would quiz me to see if I knew what each letter said. At this stage she was beginning to notice differences in fonts.
Around her second birthday we bought an upper-case and lower-case alphabet puzzle. She used the piece to match them with their “big and little pairs”. She used to love it when I wrapped all the pieces in foil so she had to unwrap each” present” before pairing them up. She also enjoyed CVC word puzzles at this age. She could not read the word but would happily say the letters and use the picture to tell us what the word said.
Being a very active child, she also enjoyed it when I wrote letters in chalk on the pavers outside, hopscotch style. I would say a letter name and she would jump on it and say its sound.
She also loved using foam letters in the bath. She would stick them around the edge of the tub in order. At first we’d stick them up and peel 4 or 5 off and have them floating in the tub. She would the have to figure out where each letter belonged. We gradually worked up to having the all floating and her being able to stick them in order independently.
Around 26 months she started wanting to make her own name from letters. She has a sign on her door, a Maisie puzzle and personalised bags, shirts and bows so she was familiar with what her name looked like.
Just prior to Maisie’s third birthday I noticed an improvement in her fine motor skills and decided to incorporate some writing play. We started by using a big cardboard box and a water-soaked paintbrush to form super big letters (which requires less skill). She loved to write her name by at first connecting dots, before moving on to following my finger, then with a prompt letter (I’d write one and she would copy underneath, until finally she could confidently do it independently.
Around this age she also started enjoying playing rhyming games. We would say a friend’s name or an object we were playing with and together sing all the words that rhymed with it. Another rhyming game we played was “wibbly wobbly X, an elephant sat on Y” Inserting fun rhyming words at X and friends names at Y e.g. “wibbly wobbly Daisy, an elephant sat on …..” and she would say Maisie!
Around 3.5years her hand muscles had developed enough to be able to write letters on a normal piece of paper. To build these pre-writing muscles we did a lot of play-dough, threading, tong and spray bottle play, as well as dot to dots and mazes
By 3.5 Maisie had also noticed initial sounds of words. We would practise these by playing eye spy in the car. She also enjoys sorting puzzle pieces or magnet shapes into initial sounds e.g. putting a mouse, mountain and moon together
By this age she was also confident in blending sounds together to create CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant eg cat, mat, hat)
We had also introduced high frequency sight words around this age too using Dolch lists below. I started with 6-8 at a time from list 1 and built up from there. We used flash cards, simple word searches, wrote words on the pavers in chalk and threw bean bags on them, covered words in sand and used a paint brush to have a word hunt, wrote words on the blackboard and used a spray bottle to squirt them off. She also loves playing boggle jr, the zingo sight word game as well as using her leap reader pen to decode words in her books. Maisie also loves watching ‘Alpha blocks’ which was recently removed from abc Kids and Netflix as another streaming site bought it, but we’ve found some of the episodes on youtube!
We don’t use the ipad much but when we do Maisie enjoys playing ‘Reading Eggs’ it is a paid program but well worth it as it is one of the only ones with an Australian accent which makes a HUGE difference when making connections!
**Videos of most of our activities are saved in my “activities” highlights on Instagram.
Here are some early literacy resources we have used and loved. Click the image to take you to where we got them.
For those of you that don’t feel confident and may need a little more guidance here is a list of further resources that might be helpful:
· Words Their Way: Letter and Picture Sorts for Emergent Spellers
· Words Their Way for PreK and K
· Teaching the Alphabet to Preschoolers
· Letting Go of the Letter of the Week
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