Mommy Talk

Teaching “A” does not always have to be “A is for apple”. When I was trying to introduce the alphabet to my daughter at 3 through play, she easily loses interest in our game when I say “A is for Apple, B is for Ball, C is for Cat, etc” while we were playing with her small magnetic letters. I just wanted her to have fun while learning so I decided, maybe we’ll try again next time. Then one morning, while we were playing the alphabet soup in her playroom, I just told her that “Do you know that P is Pooh and Piglet? T is for Tigger? A is for Arthur? B is for Backyardigans? C is for Casie? E is for Emie? and so on…”.  We just talked about the names of the characters in her favorite shows and toys like Winnie the Pooh, Arthur, Dragon Tales, and Backyardigans. We also talked about my name, her daddy’s name, grandmother, grandfather, cousins, aunts and uncles. Since that morning, everytime she sees letters while on the road, she tells me “Mom, I see P for Pooh and Piglet! And there’s C for Casie! Z for Zach! M for Mommy and Max!”.  Unconsciously, she has associated the letters with the familiar names that she hears everyday and in a week’s time, she can already identify all the letters except for some confusing ones like M and W, O and Q, and U and V. Since then, she was the one starting the conversation about letters because she is so excited and proud that she can identify them already. It is good to find out what best interests our kids and we can incorporate learning time with play time without any pressures, just for fun.

Filed under: Child Development on October 26th, 2007