ABCs 101
After recently completing a live chat session on Preparing for JK (check out the video on the Motherhood Simplified's Moms Helping Moms - The Early Years Facebook page - here), I received a few questions about activities specific to building letter recognition skills!
If you are at home with your little one, it is so important to expose your child to text every single day! Whether it is through the text on food packaging, bedtime stories, decoding street signs or explicitly practicing language skills, the more you expose and practice, the better off your child will be!
The first step to reading and one of the foundational skills for JK is letter recognition of both upper and lower case letters. Typically, kids first learn upper and then lower, and then learn to associate them together. Upper case letters are more simple and block-like, hence the greater ease of recognizing the letters.
Learning letters does not always have to feel like WORK. Beyond flashcards and reading, it's important to engage the senses and get creative with letter learning! For example, getting magnetic letters for your fridge, pasta or cereal shaped into letters, or foam letters for the tub are great ways to bring letter-learning into everyday activities! You can also make or purchase games like letter bingo!
Here are some great activities that I have found (I didn't make them, just sourced them!) you can do at home to build letter recognition skills for your children.
Hands-on Activities
15 Alphabet Identification Activities
In case you are looking to bring some technology into the mix, here are some great apps you can incorporate into your letter-learning time!
Apps and Tech
Happy Reading!
<3
Michelle