A great way to begin teaching letters to children is to focus on the ones in their first name, because their name is important to them! This is a great way to introduce and get children excited about learning letters! Once you have spent some time with the letters in their name, you can move on to teaching all the letters in the alphabet.
But what is the best way to go about this? We know that teaching a “letter a week” does not help children to distinguish among the 26 letters of the alphabet, especially for letters that are similar. Instead, children need to be learning a small set of 2-4 letters per week- initially upper-case and starting with simple lines and curves.
Click here for the Printable Resources for Uppercase Letters shown above.
To learn more, watch this clip from our Foundations of Learning to Read course, where Shenikia shares how you can plan for and teach children the letters of the alphabet in fun and engaging ways.
Check out these additional alphabet knowledge resources each week as you introduce and teach letters in fun and engaging ways:
Use these easy assessments to track children’s progress through the year:
letter test helps reading letters
I think teaching lowercase first is preferable. Children seem to pick up the uppercase letters first only because these are usually taught first. You’ve got your causation reversed.