Teaching Letters to Young Children

My children as toddlers, in their first burst of language acquisition, have loved to learn the names of animals and the sounds they make. When Karina, my oldest, turned two, my mother suggested I teach her the letters as well. She said that in her experience it was easier to teach children letters as toddlers when they are enthusiastically labeling everything in their environment than it is to wait until they are four or five years old. When we were children she taught my brothers, my sisters and me our letter sounds at two years old; we learned the letter names later. I decided to teach my children both the names and sounds at the same time, reasoning that if they knew that a cow says moo, they could learn that "m" says mmmm.

I agree with Shinichi Suzuki that education begins at birth and that we tend to underestimate what young children are capable of learning. My daughter Helena, 18 months, has reminded me of the enormous potential in every human being this week. Yesterday after eating a banana, she carried the peel to the garbage can by herself. At dinner when I asked someone to pass the milk, she pushed the milk carton towards me. These are simultaneously ordinary and miraculous accomplishments to me, ordinary because every normal child seems to blossom at this age, suddenly understanding and doing things they have been absorbing since birth, miraculous because of the explosion of latent ability that I always underestimate until it emerges. I consider throwing trash away a miracle, in part because I frequently wish my older children did it more consistently. I also sometimes sit patiently at the table pleasantly repeating, "please pass the milk" for a few minutes, then becoming less patient and pleasant when everyone ignores me.

"Human ability will not exist if it is ignored when in the seedling stage," Suzuki wrote in Ability Development from Age Zero. Children will only observe and learn those things that have been a part of their environment, and the most crucial part of this environment is the people in it. Parents and siblings need to spend time interacting with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, consciously trying to model good character. In this way, "inspiration and interest are acquired involuntarily by an infant from everything he sees and hears, like a seed that is planted. This is what molds--forms--the character . . . . It is a frightening fact. By no means only words or music, but everything, good or bad, is absorbed" (Shinichi Suzuki, Nurtured by Love).

In a few minutes a day, children can learn their letters. None of my children have considered this to be work or pressure because I have approached it like a game, and they have frequently asked to do their letters. One fun and methodical way to teach letters I discovered when my second child was two. A friend of mine told me about the way her daughter's kindergarten taught letters with sounds and actions. I loved the idea, copied it, and over the years my mother, sisters and I have adapted and changed it. You can find the method and the flash cards explained more fully on my mother's blog. My favorite is the letter O, singing opera. We always sing the short o sound to a passage from Mozart's The Magic Flute where the Queen of the Night is singing.

Because I believe in exposing my children to "whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report" (Philippians 4:8), I have some favorite alphabet books that incorporate beautiful art. The first is Museum ABC, which also comes as a board book, My First ABC, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (I own both versions). I appreciate the fact that all the examples for vowels utilize the short sounds. I try not to confuse my children with vowels when they are very young, so I teach them the name and as the sound I teach only the short sound. I find it easier to pretend that it only has one sound. When they are older, I explain that it sometimes says its name. Another book I like that is illustrated with fine art is Tigers and Sails and ABC Tales, but the vowel sounds are not as consistent. Sometimes with alphabet books I skip the pages with vowels if they use the long sound.


Flash cards, actions, sounds, books: what else is there? I also like letters that children can manipulate, especially the magnetic ones from Melissa and Doug. They come in both uppercase and lowercase. We use these to play games like "help the mommy M find the baby m" or "which one says sssss?" The more contexts children discover letters in and the more they use them, the more automatic that knowledge will be when time to learn to read arrives.

 "Inspiration and interest," acquired by a positive environment, are the foundation for all education, especially in the seedling stage. Whole-language enthusiasts are right when they say children reared in a print-rich home acquire literacy readily. Early childhood education, when approached in a positive, patient way, lays the foundation for a lifetime of enthusiasm for learning. I believe this is best done in the home, which by nature should be less stressful and competitive than a school. As a mother, I can appreciate three-year-old Luke handing me a piece of paper last week on which he wrote "L l."

"Oh, it says "LLLLL," I said.

"No, it says Luke loves Mommy."

Somehow, I don't think a teacher would retain that forever in her heart as I will.