Getting Basic Concepts Down

My preschooler has a wonderful capability for remembering things months or even years in the past. Additionally, her logic in figuring out everyday problems often astounds me. I think my daughter is pretty amazing, but like many other preschoolers she struggles in certain areas. One of our biggest struggles has been helping her learn the alphabet and count to 20. I’ve been working with her on counting and the alphabet for more than two years. She has also been enrolled in preschool for five months and although she has slowly made some improvement, she is far from where we would like to see her achievement. In fact when my son was just one year old we were getting better results with him from watching us work with her than she was from working one-on one with us.

As a working mom and full time student, I do not have all the time I would like to teach my children so share this responsibility with my husband. When we decided to teach my daughter colors she did remarkable. We made it a combined effort and designed a strategic plan which included a weekly theme, internet appropriate games that allowed her to utilize what she was learning, incorporating the colors into her everyday routine, and repetition of the colors she had already learned so she did not forget.

One of our goals is to read to our children at least 20 minutes every day because reading to your child is one way parents can help their children comprehend sounds of letters (Piasta and Wagner, 2010). Like we did when we taught her colors, we can make this more of a tag-team effort.

Music has resulted in some of the highest advances I’ve seen for her. We made up a song that spells out her name and the more often we sing it the better she does. Music makes repetition easy because you can sing songs over and over. Recently we have started to sing the ABCs while she washes her hands and a few times while she brushes her teeth. There is a two-fold benefit because her hygiene practices are improving and she can now sing 90% of the ABCs without any errors. Music has also been shown to improve children’s cognitive ability including increasing their vocabulary (Moreno et al., 2011).

One reason all of this is so important is because a child who has does not have good understanding of the alphabet by the time they enter kindergarten could be at a disadvantage academically (Piasta and Wagner, 2010). Parents typically want their children to succeed, but sometimes the question is what else can be done. We will continue to do what we have been doing,and do it more frequently. We are going to make a weekly letter and number and make it part of her daily life like we did with the colors. I also found a website that has some additional suggestions for teaching the ABCs that I am excited to use. http://www.justmommies.com/articles/teach-alphabet.shtml.

Moreno, S., Bilystok, E., Barac, R., Schellenberg, E. G., Cepeda, N. J., Chau, T., (2011). Short-Term Music Training Enhances Verbal Intelligence and Executive Function. Psychologica Science, 22, 1425-1433. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41320049.

Piasta, S. B., Wagner, R.K., (2010). Developing Early Literacy Skills: A Meta-Analysis of Alphabet Learning and Instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 45, 8-38. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25614628.