My son, like most preschoolers I know, goes through phases with his book, CD, and video interests. For the past few days, his video of choice has been Sesame Street’s Learning About Letters. I love this video. I was part of the first generation of children to grow up with Sesame Street, and many of the vignettes on Learning About Letters are classics I remember from my own childhood, pre-Elmo. Some highlight a specific letter; others go through the whole alphabet. What impresses me are the number of ways they do so, through song, poem, dialogue, and visuals in a variety of styles. Children will find what resonates with them. It reminds me why Sesame Street remains one of the most educational—and yet entertaining—children’s programs, even without the whizzy graphics and special effects of newer shows.
I’m trying to expose my son to letters in a variety of ways, though, and videos are just one of them. I point out letters on books, road signs, t-shirts, and anything else that seems interesting. I draw letters with a stick in his sandbox. I’ve also stocked up on Newman’s Own Alphabet Cookies. They look like Scrabble tiles and come in chocolate and cinnamon-graham varieties. Three cookies have less than three grams of sugar, which is pretty good on the scale of kids’ treats. Our son usually has a few after dinner, and enjoys identifying each letter before munching.
Not that everything has to be educational. There’s certainly a place for fun, pure and simple. But learning and fun don’t always have to be separate, either. How do you teach your kids without making it seem like effort?
My son’s early learning of letters and numbers never felt like that much work. It started on our evening walks when he was about 18-months-old. Whenever we had to stop for a red light, he was interested in the signs explaining the different phases of the signal. At first he wanted to push the rivets as if they were buttons, but then I began pointing out individual letters to him. He started out calling everything “E” and then slowly figured out a handful, until he expanded to the whole alphabet. Numbers were similar and he quickly learned up to 12.
At 3, we’re now working on the alphabet in order (he loves singing and we love his little tuneless voice) and numbers after 12. The teens seem to be a little difficult for him, but he gets the pattern with 20 and on. Most of our number practice occurs at the end of the bath when we count the toys we put away–many have multiple parts, so we can easily get into the 20s if we count every little thing.
Our main pre-reading activity is reading books he already knows well, such as “Go, Dog, Go.” Sometimes he’ll just recite it without even looking at the pages, sometimes he’ll let me point to the words on the page as he says them and watches my finger. I’m not sure that he’s quite made the connection, but he loves reciting emphatically and I figure the understanding will come quicker with an enjoyable activity.
We read and write and cook together – but it is since we started playing games that I have really noticed a quick learning jump in the reading department. We started with Uno and Chess but now we are into Monopoly and Kids Trivial Pursuit and he loves that we are together playing a game so much that he doesn’t notice how much he is counting and adding and reading.
C is for Cookie is such a memorable line from Sesame Street. I still remember learning that…many years later.