Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart

Author:Maya Payne Smart [Smart, Maya Payne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Teaching Letter Names the Smart Way

As readers ourselves, parents often fail to grasp what a leap it is even to see letters as distinct from other images and graphics in print. To know an O from a circle or an H from a stick figure is the result of a long learning process, a slow-growing awareness of print and its properties. At first, pictures, letters, and numbers are all a bunch of 2D marks to be deciphered.

Parents with savvy and resources, though, tend to use a wide range of activities and contexts at home to build and reinforce alphabetic skills. They play with magnetic letters, point out letters on household items, read alphabet books, and talk about the letters in their child’s name. In questionnaires, in-the-know parents reported using an average of fourteen out of eighteen different home-teaching contexts, from storybooks and shopping lists to letter blocks and flash cards, to engage kids with the alphabet. Brief teachable moments pave the way.

Unsurprisingly, the parents who reported teaching the ABCs the most frequently tended to be those with high expectations of what their kids should know before first grade. These parents had wisely linked the letter work they did with future school achievement. And you can do the same.

What you say to your children about letter shapes, names, and sounds—and when—matters. When you take responsibility for teaching your kids the alphabet before they start kindergarten, you’re doing crucial work to support their later success. Speak with knowledge and intention, seize everyday moments, and structure your home and schedule to support deliberate learning. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

CALL LETTERS BY THEIR NAMES. While some people prefer to teach letter sounds before letter names, the fact of the matter is that kids need to know both—and instruction is simpler when you have unique and consistent labels. I say teach both at the same time. “Clearly, it is easier to say, ‘Point to the A,’ than to say, ‘Point to the letter that says /æ/ (or /ä/ or /ā/ or /uh/),’ ” pioneering researcher Marilyn Jager Adams explains.

Think of the names as labeled buckets in which kids collect all their encounters with a letter—uppercase, lowercase, print, cursive, its various sounds, and so on. Over time and through exposure, in one’s memory, “the label provides a means of bonding together all of one’s experiences with a to-be-learned concept,” Adams writes. “In doing so, it can only hasten the recognition of the similarities of the concept across its occurrences.”

Recent research continues to provide support for using letter names. Studies suggest that letter-name knowledge benefits young children’s spelling, for example—a crucial component of literacy development. And researchers have found evidence that combining letter-name training with letter-sound instruction accelerates letter-sound learning.

Parents’ talk about letters and use of letter names can start at any time but becomes particularly powerful when kids are 3 years old and can focus on letters in print. At that point, they can begin to forge letter identities through repeated experience with their shapes, names, and sounds.

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