Here’s the Best Way for Your Child to Learn the Alphabet, and You May Be Surprised

Are you trying to teach your young child his ABCs? You’ve probably been singing the Alphabet Song and using magnetic letters on the refrigerator. Or maybe your child is using a learning tablet or one of the hundreds of apps out there for learning letters.

You’re already introducing your child to letters, which is great! But you may be surprised to learn what the research tells us about how children learn the alphabet best.

How Children Best Learn Letters

Two separate research studies came to the same conclusion about how children best learn to recognize and identify letters.

In 2005, researcher Marieke Longcamp and colleagues looked at how preliterate children learned letters. They trained two groups of preschool children to copy letters of the alphabet. One group copied letters by hand and the other group copied letters by typing them on a keyboard. After three weeks of learning, the children were given letter recognition tests, right after learning and again after one week.

The children that actually wrote the letters by hand performed significantly better than the other group. The researchers concluded that just being exposed to letters isn’t enough for learning and that the act of producing the letters by hand was an important component of learning.

A similar study conducted by Karin James and Laura Engelhardt in 2012 compared preliterate five-year old children learning letters in three ways — one group typing on a keyboard, another group tracing letters, and a third group copying them by hand.

The researchers conducted brain scans (functional MRIs) while the children were copying the letters. These showed significantly more brain activation when children self-generated the letters (writing by hand.) Tracing letters showed less activation, and the least brain activation occurred when keyboarding.

This study also tested letter recognition and retention after learning and found corresponding results. The greatest learning occurred in the children that wrote by hand and the least in those that typed on a keyboard.

Why is This So Important?

In our technological culture where there are thousands of apps and programs to teach kids with a screen and keyboard, the best learning happens by doing.

The sensorimotor act of moving a pencil deliberately and with control to form letters creates much more activation in the brain, in those areas that affect letter perception, memory, and eventually learning to read.

So while apps can be fun and engaging, they are best used to supplement, not replace, hands-on learning.

But My Child Can’t Even Hold a Pencil Yet

Most children don’t have the fine motor skills or hand strength to hold a pencil correctly until about 4 years old.

The children in these research studies were 4 and 5 years old and able to control a pencil in order to write letters.

So I am not suggesting that preschoolers be made to attempt something for which they are not developmentally ready. But once your child can control a pencil, she is ready to attempt writing letters, which will result in deeper learning, as the research shows.

Your child can also use her pointer finger to “write” in sand, shaving cream, or other media, or on paper with fingerpaint.

In the Meantime, Make it Multisensory

There’s plenty of brain research out there to support the fact that the more senses that are involved, the greater the learning and retention. And, as everyone from Piaget to Montessori to Mister Rogers has told us, “Play is the work of the child.” So make it fun!

Engage your child in activities that involve multiple senses to introduce the alphabet. Roll out Play-doh and form letters, build letters out of Legos, turn your Twister game into a letter identification game, “Fish” for letters in a water tub, and so much more!

Want to Know What Else Your Child Needs to Know To Be Ready to Read?

Besides knowing letters, there are other pre-reading skills that your child needs to know before he is ready to learn to read.

I’ve created a free 15-page e-Guide, “Is Your Child Ready to Read?” that will tell you what skills your child needs to have before starting to learn to read. It also includes activities and games to play with your child to develop these pre-reading skills.

Click here for my FREE e-Guide “Is Your Child Ready to Read?”