teaching the abc's

amother

Wed, Jul 22 2009, 8:09 pm

can anyone share tried and true techniques on how to go about introducing and teaching the abc's to kindergartners. looking for specific methods as well as creative ideas. tia

Wed, Jul 22 2009, 8:45 pm

are you asking for a classroom of children or for a single child?

amother

Thu, Jul 23 2009, 9:43 am

classroom

anonmommy

Thu, Jul 23 2009, 10:45 am

I would be interested in hearing responses for a child at home, we live in israel and this wont be taught until they are 8 or so.

fiddle

Thu, Jul 23 2009, 11:07 am

my dd 2 and 4 months, watches some ABC clips on youtube.com and recognizes most of the letters and numbers. she also has one clip of the sounds they each make and is picking it up slowly..its all memorization. songs are the best than visual with songs and they end up matching it up with eachother

youngbubby

Tue, Aug 11 2009, 4:18 pm

I am a special ed teacher in the public school system I teach 5-8 year olds. I teach the alphabet with alphabet cards that come with opur reading program. every letter has a picture on it that makes the correct sound. For ex. We say Big A little A on the picture is a lamb what does a lamb say Ah ah ah and we say that big B little b the there is a picture of a ball and we say bbb bouncing our hand with a pretend ball. Believe it or not it works and my special ed kids love circle time when we do this. good luck if u have a questions let me know..

imasinger

Tue, Aug 11 2009, 4:53 pm

My DD's teacher used a variety of sensory ways to teach, from having 2 or 3 kids make themselves into each letter (and then she took a picture and posted it, as they learned each new one) to using a variety of materials to decorate each letter in the book they made. They also would use shaving cream or finger paint. Each page of her "dictionary" had the letter, which she decorated, and on the facing page were stickers, drawings, or cutouts of things beginning with that letter.

YALT

Tue, Aug 11 2009, 5:22 pm

fiddle wrote:

can you please post the links?

youngbubby

Tue, Aug 11 2009, 6:57 pm

There is a web site that is free and I use it in my classroom. It is starfall.com/ It is a very exciting site that has all levels on it. My 3 and 4 year old granchildren go on it and they love it. The four year old already knows her beg. sounds ect. check it out you will be amazed,

ceetee

Sun, Aug 30 2009, 5:23 pm

mystery box - my class loved
everytime u introduce a new letter have kids guess whats inside box whoever guesses gets to hold it,eat it.. ex letter g put grapes glue gum, ...

Sun, Aug 30 2009, 5:34 pm

anonmommy wrote:

I would be interested in hearing responses for a child at home, we live in israel and this wont be taught until they are 8 or so.

Im a firm believer in not teaching the alphabet by name, only teaching the sounds the letters make. It bypasses all the pain of unlearning the name of the letter when it comes time to learn to read. Its so much harder reteaching that an M or S does not start with an 'eh' sound (of ehmmm or ehsss)

We had great success with "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" which is where I first learned of bypassing the names of the letters. It would have saved my son a lot of stress if I had read the book before teaching my older DS. I also used this method with teaching Hebrew and it worked just as well with both languages.

Atali

Sun, Aug 30 2009, 5:40 pm

JC wrote:

anonmommy wrote:

I would be interested in hearing responses for a child at home, we live in israel and this wont be taught until they are 8 or so.

There is a problem with that method, which is that the kids eventually do need to know the names of the letters.

I went to seminary with a girl who was taught with that method. As an adult she had difficult spelling things for others because she never properly learned the names of the letters.

It seems to me that it would be even worse for Hebrew, since the Hebrew language is based on shorashim (that may not always be pronounced the same) and requires a thorough knowledge of the letters to understand.

Sun, Aug 30 2009, 6:38 pm

Atali wrote:

JC wrote:

anonmommy wrote:

I would be interested in hearing responses for a child at home, we live in israel and this wont be taught until they are 8 or so.

Well you do teach the names of letters, but not until you got the sounds down pat. With all the outside influences teaching the names my kids did learn the names easily. I was just glad that the first influence my younger one had was the sounds, the schools (or PBS if you watch TV) drummed in the names, so I would not be worried about it.
The positives far outweighed the slight chance of that happening. I would actually bet that the girl you knew who had trouble would have had LOADS more trouble reading if she first learned the names. If a kid didnt get the names down after learning the sounds it most likely they would have had just as much trouble learning the sounds after learning the names. As I said before if you weigh the two, reading is more important than spelling out loud.