It is not enough for your child to recognize all the letters of the alphabet, in both capital letter and lowercase form, and to know the names and sounds of each alphabet before entering school. You should help your child to understand the alphabets, recognize them individually and even when they are out of order or embedded within words. Another important thing your child needs to know is about the difference between printed and handwritten letters.
Even though the teachers dedicate early years in the school for teaching children to recognize the name of letters, to write the them with right curves and to associate them with sounds, it helps to a great extent if parents give letter knowledge to their children at home to ease the burden of learning when they enter shcool.
Give confidence to your child in school
Every child who enters school has different abilities. Those who have sound letter knowledge and are able to write their names or read simple words will gain more self-confidence than those who fail to recite alphabets. The reason for poor performance may not always be their potential for learning, but rather how the parents have guided them during the pre-school years.
With high demands from schools today, not much time is dedicated to teaching alphabets to students; rather, teachers concentrate on laying foundation for better reading and learning even from the first year the child spends in school.
Academics may become burden on children who were not given letter knowledge in their pre-school years. This becomes a vicious cycle where the child will not like school and learning, which will reflect in poor performance and lack of encouragement which again will lead to dislike towards learning and school. Finally, the child will lose confidence in self and may perceive oneself as a loser.
How to help your child
Though teachers love to promote every student’s knowledge and felicitate learning in the classroom, parents have to understand that teachers cannot give individual attention to each child based on their needs and learning potential.
The teachers have to follow the planned curriculum for the year which is provided by the school. It is left up to the parents, in this demanding scenario to help their child fit into the school with enough resources that ease the burden of learning.
Promoting letter knowledge is not just important for studies, but it is also important for other developmental areas in a child.
You can help your child to
- Recognize and name alphabets, both uppercase and lowercase letters
- Create awareness about how letters are grouped in a specific ways to create words
- Create connection between letter names and the sound they make
- Start to scribble alphabets
Though the skills are simple, it goes a long way in helping your child to settle down in school.
