Teddy learning ABC

What is the best way to learn the alphabet? Every parent asks this question many times.  Nowadays we have a lot of different toys that were created to help kids and parents. Some of them are simple; other ones are fancy and quite sophisticated. We did not know exactly what we need at the beginning and when Teddy became a toddler we started buying for him toys for learning the alphabet.

First it was wooden cubes with letters on each side. The problem was that each cube had only lowercase letters and they had different colours. Since the difference between lowercase letters and capital letters is significant for most of the letters, it was a lot of confusion in addition to a colour distraction that affected Teddy’s learning process as well.

Last summer we bought big capital letters curved from wood and those one were nice to play with, but it was difficult to use them as a learning material, since they are big and only capital. They occupied much space just to store them as well.

A while ago we bought ‘Fisher Price’ phone with letter and number modes. However letters were only capital there and they appeared more than one at a time which made it just a fun toy and Teddy was not able to concentrate on particular letter at one time.

After that Teddy tried ‘VTech’ laptop, but only small letters were there on the screen, but you have to find and type capital letters on the keyboard.

So I can continue the list of all these alphabet toys we got spending lots of money until we found a winner. Actually we had it all the time at home and didn’t realize it. More than a year ago we went to “Samko & Miko” warehouse sale and bought there for Teddy among other toys alphabet cards. We put them aside until he becomes old enough to use them and completely forgot about them. They cost only loonie and it appears they are able to do the magic.

We found them one day and gave it to Teddy to play with. Every card has a Capital Letter, a hidden lowercase letter on front and a hidden word and picture on the back. For example for letter A there is a picture of ant and word ant.

As soon as we start using cards, Teddy starts learning alphabet very fast. We put all cards on the floor front side up and tell him every letter, explaining difference between capital and lowercase letter and that even though they look different they are the same. The biggest fun for Teddy was to hear an alphabet song. He liked it very much and sings with us how he could.

It didn’t take more than a month to learn the whole alphabet and Teddy started reading letters in words.

From our experience – simple cards helped Teddy much better than fancy expensive alphabet toys. The cards are also tangible and portable so Teddy can hold all of them in one hand and then take and explore them with another.

Now we have a new challenge to overcome – Teddy has a problem with pronouncing some letters correctly. But that is another story to tell you about how we deal with it.