Welcome to this week's
Language and a Latte! I have two requests for this weekly feature:
1. You have some sort of caffeine close by while reading this...coffee, diet coke...hence the latte in the title of this post. Why, you ask? I can truly attest to the benefits caffeine has on the brain. Proof: 90% of the women in my graduate class had coffee at hand during any given class...whether it was an 8 AM class or a 6 PM class. The speech-language pathology field is saturated with women...there are several theories on this...but I'll go with the fact that women historically talk much much more than men. Am I right ladies?
2. You smile, laugh, and sit in wonder as you watch your little one learn. Whether this little one calls you Mommy, Daddy, Grandma, Papa, Nana, Gigi, Aunt, Uncle, or even some variation of your first name, I hope that you see the beauty in participating in the learning of a little soul. It is truly life-breathing.
Now...onto this week's info.
Teaching ABCs to toddlers:
The first thing that comes to my mind is that age-old tradition of the ABC song...which by the way is sung to the same tune as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star...but moving on...
Singing this song to your little one very early on is a great way to introduce the ABCs; I think I began singing this song to Harleigh around a year. Looking back I probably should have thrown it in my song bag along with Itsy Bitsy Spider and Patty Cake back when she was 5 months but I'll cut myself a break on that one because really, just singing to your little one does more for their brain development than I could even begin to explain in one post.
The beautiful brunette in this picture is my sister-in-
law love. She sings to my girls every time we see her...she's pretty much one of my favorite people-and one of Harleigh's.
Professionally, I am huge on using a variety of activities across the senses to target a skill.
Here are some examples:
1. ABC song
2. ABC books
3. ABC puzzles
4. ABC flash cards
5. ABC magnets
6. ABC crackers
7. ABC Spaghettios
8. finger painting
9. drawing the letters in sand
10. ABC cookie cutters
11. and if you're super creative, constructing letters out of flowers/sticks/leaves
My little girl talks about flowers all the time so she loves this one.
This would also be a great activity for elementary school ages to target spelling.
I use 1 or 2 of these per day for 5-10 minutes and I have seen steady results with my 17 month old. She doesn't know all of the letters but she has an awareness of them and she knows that they are letters, and I have found her attempting to sing the ABC song, which is super cute because A-D is clear as a bell and the rest turns into babbled singing. Maybe in a couple weeks A-H will be clear, as we are working on four letters at a time.
Because there are 26 letters in the English alphabet, I have tried breaking it up into 4 letter chunks at a time with my little one. We worked on A-D for 2 weeks and she can now label them on her own! We are now onto E-H for the next 2 weeks and I'll be interested to see if she is able to carry this over by adding it to the A-D sequence. I'll keep ya'll posted over the next couple of weeks.
Below is a link to a website that I think is phenomenal when it comes to ABC learning activities.
Fantastic Fun and Learning
We all know how important it is to read to our children. It's also extremely important to point out the text as you read to your child. Research shows that children predominately focus on the pictures 90% of the time.
Pointing out the text as your read will increase their awareness of letter recognition.
I'll be going a little more in depth with this topic next week.
Thanks for joining me this week for
Language and a Latte! These are just some of the things I've used in my career and as a mom. Different things work for different children, and sometimes you have to try several different approaches before you find one that works for your child. I encourage you to try different things until you find an approach that is successful for your child. Experiencing success is a huge deal for children...it increases their confidence and their love for learning.
