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How to Build Skills to Prepare Your Kids for Letter Recognition

How to Build Skills to Prepare Your Kids for Letter Recognition

One of the few skills that, as a parent, you would dwell into teaching your kids would be that of ‘Letter Recognition’. Letter recognition skills majorly involved distinguishing shapes of different letters/alphabets from each other, studying the various forms of letters, and writing them. Though your kid’s brain is still too tiny to process all of these, you may begin by training it with foundational pre-reading and pre-writing skills. Here Preschool Fontana will discuss the activities that can build your Child Skills. Ensure that you observe patience and include fun activities in the said task and not distress him. Your Kids will learn things at their own pace.

Work on the Prerequisites:

It would be a great idea to build up specific prerequisite skills in your Kids that would mold his path towards letter recognition. This prerequisite skill set includes visual and auditory perception, and of course, memory. While visual perception helps with reading, auditory perception shall help with listening and eventually speaking. 

The former involves assessing details and shapes of what your kids see through his eyes and developing his visual motor and eye-hand coordination – 2 of the many essential aspects of locomotion. Some pleasurable activities to build a visual perception would be ‘catch and throw’ games, lacing his shoes, building puzzles, ‘fetch-the-ball’, etc. The best activity would be to read books to them that have interesting pictures and figures. Make it a point to point at common words that you read and frequently spell them out aloud. You may also get them to draw and colour. One common mistake to avoid during the growth years of your kid would be excess screen-time expenditure. It has reported hampering the development of visual perception in kids. 

Make your kids listen to music, identify other bird and animal sounds, clap rhythmically, listen to rhymes, sing songs to them, talk to them, tell them stories, recite poems, etc. 

One needs to store the information that one perceives. Help your children’s to develop their memory by indulging them in fun memory games, e.g. cards, visual memory games, auditory memory games, story visualization, and reading & talking about books.

How and Where to Begin?

Start with those that are of most relevance to your kids, like ‘Mom’, ‘Dad’, his/her name, names of family members, name of your pet, etc. This will help them relate those words to their real identity easily and memorize faster. Please keep track of other words/ letters/ spellings that your kid is more interested in and focus on teaching them in the beginning phase. 

When you progress to familiarize yourself with the writing of individual letters, it would always help to start with uppercase letters as they have thicker lines and curves. Pushing your kids to form letters that their visual-motor skills are not yet ready to cope with may cause your kid to grow bad habits. They will progress gradually. Just give them an appropriate time.

Activities you may consider indulging in

Locate prints around you – signs in a restaurant, labels, logos – talk aloud about the words written on them, spell them out and emphasize the sounds of these words. Accentuate rhyme and rhythm in them by reading out rhyming books to them. Challenge them to come up with rhyming words of their own. Grab a magazine or any other attractive form of literature and make your kids’ letter hunt for letters he is the most familiar with. Make the cut-out letters in their name and paste them on the wall or the fridge or the cupboard door, or any place they frequently visit. Plastic/ wooden letters come in handy at such times. You may ask them to make words with them, sort them based on their shape, sound, etc. You may enjoy playing ‘Letter fish pond’, a musical chair with letters, Hidden letters, etc.  

The more fun you make this entire experience for your kids, the more interest they would develop towards “Letter Recognition”. Preschool Fontana says “It will improve their quality and rate of learning the same”.

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