Introduction
My daughter already knows the alphabet for quite some time now. We practiced it by singing the alphabet song that we all know from our own childhood probably..
A-B-C-D-E-F-G
H-I-J-K-LMNOP
Q-R-S
T-U-V
W and X
Y and Zee
Now I know my “ABCs”
Next time won’t you sing with me?
I don't know if this is something that more children are struggling with, but my daughter had some struggles learning the LMNOP part. She tripped on her own tongue to pronounce the L, M, N separate rather than skipping one of them. Luckily, she can sing her alphabet correctly now, although I need to keep practicing with her because from time to time she falls back into the same mistakes.
Today I want to start using flashcards to practice the alphabet with her to see if that helps her to remember the letters. I will also let her practice writing the letters using a worksheet.
Flashcards
I'm going to use this set of flashcards, I have them for quite some time now and don't even remember where I bought them. They have been in her toy box for quite some time to play with, rather than us practicing the alphabet. I had to sort them out to see if they were still complete. The set seems to contain a few different sets of cards to practice, including a small card with all the letters from A to Z.
We use this card to point at the letter while pronouncing it, so she starts learning the letters for writing as well.
Today I'm only going to use this set of cards:
This set has images on the card as well as the letters and words like "Apple", "Bear" etc. I know that these words are currently not important yet, but in the future, I hope it helps her to learn how to write these words.
I tried to hold these cards up asking which letter it was, after we had practiced several rounds of the alphabet by singing it and pointing at the letters on the single flashcard. She named the things that were in the image instead of the letter, and could not grab her head around it yet when I asked her what the first letters of these words are, to hopefully teach her that the images are just helping her to learn. When she got frustrated I knew that today's class was a bit of overload for her.
When I noticed that, I decided to switch to the writing part instead.
Worksheet
This is today's worksheet for this class about the alphabet. You can download it by clicking on the link below the worksheet.
She is actually quite good at writing, so I've noticed. She also has a good interest in writing because it happens every few days that she initiates to write something outside of the classes as well. One of us needs to write something down for her and then she tries to copy the letters (quite well), or she just finds a letter or something copying the text. I notice that the writing is way more up her sleeve than the informative/drilling method to learn the letters of the alphabet.
Conclusion
Today it turned out that the flashcards with images are too distracting for my daughter. She has trouble following instructions when there's too much distraction around. In this case, it turned out that the images and words were taking away her attention from the letters. I decided that this set will be swapped for the simpler set flashcards that only has the letters on it until she is a bit further in her learning path.
As she loves the writing part much more than the informative/drilling method of the classes, I will try to find a way to make her get less frustrated when she forgets something and switch to writing for a while instead. She's only 5 years old and the last thing I want is for her to feel stressed about this.
We are going to keep practicing the alphabet every day for a short period to see how that goes, and take it from there..
For me it's a good lesson as well to put away the flashcards for now and adapt how we are going to learn this. I'm thinking to check out https://www.abcmouse.com to help her get started by subscribing for a trial month. I can imagine that if she likes the method of teaching, she will pick up easier.
If you have experience with ABC mouse or other similar online teaching sites, please feel free to share your experience!