Teaching The ABCs

*I lost the whole draft I typed so this most likely won't be as nice as the one I had already written. Lucky for you, you don't know what was already written so you're not missing out.*

Lately I have been reading books about how to teach your child to read. I have even purchased a couple phonics primer program books to use when it comes to be time to actually teach her that. I know that she isn't ready for phonics instruction quite yet, but I do want to make sure that she has all of the pre-reading skills that she needs.

Among those skills is recognizing the alphabet letters by sight and knowing their sounds (duh). Abby doesn't yet. She knows the alphabet, but she doesn't recognize any letters except for O and the capital A. And I wonder to myself, at what age do other kids know their letters and sounds?

And yes I know that I shouldn't compare to other children because each one is different, but if we moms are honest we all so it.

Anyways, I have been making some alphabet flash cards for Abby. Nothing fancy, just the capital letter on one side and the lowercase on the other. I decided to try th out with her today. I took the A, B, and C. She recognized the capital A but called the lowercase A B. But after the first round of me asking her what letter this was and then helping her if she didn't know it, she grew bored and wanted to play with the cards and wasn't focusing on me at all. We ended up in a big fight over this, resulting in her going to her room.

This felt supremely discouraging to me. I had hoped that we could get at least ten minutes on the cards. I guess that I just need to have patience since she hasn't ever really had any kind of structured activity in her life before. So I will continue with the cards, and hopefully I will be able to one day report that she knows all the letters.