A-a-Apple

Before my boys attended preschool, we started to make their own ABC books. It sat on the shelf of our office as they were enrolled in preschool collecting dust, until a few days ago. I decided to pull my 3 year-old's ABC book. We went over the pages of the letters he knew. It didn't surprise me that he knew more than the 6 letters he recognized back then. Since attending preschool, he has learned and recognized lots of new letters.

So what I did was add the ones to his ABC book in alphabetical order. I only added 4 new letters at a time. I wrote on one side of the page, "M m" (he recognized both the upper and lower case) and on the other side I gave him a choice of pictures I could draw that started with M; monkey, man, mail. He chose "monkey", and so I drew a picture of a monkey on the other page then he colored it. I had him pick the picture because I wanted him to remember the name of the picture so he could automatically associate it with the letter. I wouldn't have him pick something he was unsure of like "mail" because he could look at it and think it's a picture of a "letter" and that would defeat the purpose of matching the picture to the letter Mm. After coloring, I asked him to point to the uppercase M then the lower case m then the picture of the monkey and say "M-m-monkey". We repeated this process with the other three letters. Over the next few days, I will continue to do this until all the letters he knows are in the ABC book. Each day we will review it, and some days I will open it to random pages to see if he can "read" it. Recognizing letters of the alphabet is an important prereading and prewriting skill. Soon he will know these letters represent sounds and these letters put together make words.

So making an ABC book would not only be a teaching tool, but a resource for any child as he begins to venture into reading and writing. He can use it like a dictionary for letters to refer back to when he can't quite remember what that letter looks like or what that letter might sound like. Learning the alphabets is one of the foundations to prereading. In my article: Are they really ready for reading? I mention other prereading skills and behaviors necessary for reading readiness.