March 3, 2007 10:33 AM
Teach lower case letters first
An offhand remark I made in a previous post about not buying anything for preschoolers that used capital letters generated this question:
Would you please briefly elaborate on teaching lower case letters first? I am teaching letters to my little ones and have been helping them write their names each day, and we use all caps. I want to be clear about this - that we should switch to lower case now. :) Thanks so much!
Here's the deal: look at what you are reading. Most of it is lower case letters. So that's the starting point of teaching kids to read and write - teaching lower case. Once they start reading actual books - where sentences begin with a capital letter, they will quite naturally absorb those too.
The important thing about teaching reading is that you start with enough information to help your child be successful at reading short phonetic words and then - because he has the positive reinforcement of seeing his efforts succeed - he will approach the harder stuff with confidence and joy.
It's more than I can write about in a blog entry - which is why I've written a book :) - to show how you can use the Montessori approach in a home environment to help your child learn to read and love reading all his life - while building a closer connection to you.
So, my advice is to change your style. If you want to teach your child to write his name, do use the capital to begin with, but make the rest lower case.
Posted in Preschoolers | Permalink
Comments
Thank you! I learned to teach them to write in captial letters first, and one day my husband helped my son write his name the right way. :) It is funny that the right way IS right after all. ;)
Posted by: honey | March 4, 2007 2:35 PM
I just wanted to say that I totally agree with this. My mom is a preschool teacher and has always taught her kids to write their names just as they see them - with one capital, then all lower case letters. It's interesting how much this makes sense, yet I still see kids in sunday school kindergarten writing their names all in upper case.
Posted by: Anna | March 5, 2007 6:24 PM
