How to Teach Kids Letter Identification

Video Transcript

"Every day right after doing the alphabet song and the alphabet sounds chant, I go right to having the children practice writing their letters and identifying them. You can start out by having a chart of the alphabet behind them. I like to break up the upper case and lower case. I like to put the upper case on one side and the lower case on the other and then have the children combine them on the worksheet because that helps them to look back and forth and to group the upper case a with the lower case a but if you, you know, you could have them together too and as they get better, you can take the poster down and have them just write them from memory. This is a very easy worksheet to make, you can photocopy it but you almost don't have to because it's so easy. What I do is I start, I write name and when they learn to write the date, I start having them put their name and date on every paper but always, first thing they can learn to write as a full word is their name. And you can put date there too if you want. Now, in the future it would look like that. Now, all I do is, remember the alphabet the way I broke it up with seven letters, seven letters, six letters, six letters and the six letters are broken up into threes so it goes like this. One, two, three, actually make the lines a little bit longer because they have to fit two letters on each line, one, two, three, four, five, six seven, next line, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, see how quickly this goes, next line, one, two, three leave a space, one two, three, because that's how the song goes, and one, two, three, leave a space, one, two, three and when the children get stuck they can sing the song in their head and you have a b c d e f g, h i j k l m n, o p q, r s t, uvw, xyz, and you want them to actually write it with upper and lower case, like that. This is a great exercise in the beginning. What I do to make it even more fun, I photocopy the exact same thing on the back and then I tell them great, you did it, now flip it over, do it one more time and I still call it one worksheet and that way you can get away with having them do some extra practice."