Making Your Child’s First Lesson in Alphabets Easy: Choosing What to Teach

What is the first thing your child learns in a school? Aren’t they the Alphabets?

Since learning alphabets is the first major step in a child’s academic process, it is essential that your child learns these alphabets properly. And it is important to teach using easy to understand examples.

 
One of the traditional ways of teaching alphabets is associating each alphabet with a real life thing and let the child know what the alphabet stands for. Hence, we introduce the alphabets as ‘A’ for ‘Apple’, ‘B’ for ‘Ball’ and so on.

In this short article, we will discuss this traditional method of teaching the alphabets. The prime aim of the article is to give you an idea about good examples and bad examples of associating a real life object with an alphabet.

Let me explain this point with a scenario.

Ravi and Roma are husband and wife. They have a three year old son. When this enthusiastic couple tried teaching their son his first alphabets, they landed up in a tricky situation. Ravi had purchased a very colourful alphabet book and the couple started teaching their son with the aid of that book. Initially, they had a tough time teaching few letters because their son couldn’t relate to the examples for those letters. The book had associations like ‘I’ for ‘Igloo’, ‘K’ for ‘Kangaroo’, ‘Q’ for ‘Quill’, and ‘X’ for ‘Xylophone’. The child use to frequently ask questions about the unknown pictures even when the parents tried to give different examples.

It is difficult for a three year old child to understand the concepts like igloo and quill. A child at that age will usually perceive an ‘Igloo’ as some form of house or structure and ‘Quill’ as some kind of feather. Though using animal names as examples for alphabets is a good idea, it would be difficult for a child to relate to ‘Kangaroo’ for two reasons: 

1. The spelling is lengthy for a child learning the alphabets for the first time.
2. Kangaroo is not an animal common to a three year old, except if the child is from a country like Australia. 

As for ‘Xylophone’, it is difficult even for older children to understand what exactly it is.

The key is to keep the examples simple and short for the child to comprehend their meaning on its own. Thus, the book could have given examples, such as ‘I’ for ‘Ice’, ‘K’ for ‘Kite’, ‘Q’ for ‘Queen’ and ‘X’ for ‘Xmas Tree’.

 
You can plan your child’s alphabet learning process wherein you gradually increase the difficultly level of examples depending on the child’s progress. For the first few alphabet lessons, you can use, as far as possible, simple three or four lettered easy to comprehend examples depicting things your child comes across in day-to-day life.