Alphabet for young children…

A cousin of ours asked this question today, for her 1 year and 7 month old child. The child seems to have learnt numbers 1 to 10 on her own!

Please note how she prefaces the question – she already knows what we think of teaching alphabet and numbers to very young children. And that we adore this child. Our answer is below. We share this so that someone who knows better can correct us if we got something wrong, and may be someone will learn from this.

Question: I know you don’t appreciate this question much, but I have to ask “which is a better way to teach the alphabet, with letter names or sounds” ?

Chitra: Very difficult question…May be you want to teach her other things first. Labeling – nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions; Visual skills – matching pictures, objects, recognising these two are one. Then matching things that go together, then sorting and categorising (children need not have the vocabulary for this. It’s intuitive. We can provide vocabulary when they group). All these are pre-number, pre-reading skills. Let the child engage in these activities in context, for example when you are sorting vegetables.

Venu: What chitra is saying is – do some of these instead of the alphabet. Visual matching, categorising and sorting are the basic cognitive skills that children anyway use to process what they see around them. That’s how we all “learn about the world”. It would be good for her to do this in context, while she engages with a real world task.

Writing is a very specific way of encoding information and reading is a very specialised skill, if you look at it that way. Reading as a way of acquiring information, is a very “limiting” skill, in the sense that once you figure reading is a way to acquire information, you stop looking for information through other approaches like doing it yourself. Children should be left to explore the world a little longer, I feel.

Unfortunately, since reading requires only the ability to see and the ability to make sounds, and does not require eye hand coordination or other motor skills that may be needed for children to engage more with the kind of hands-on activities we are able to offer them in confined spaces like our homes and apartments, they are getting introduced to alphabet earlier. It doesn’t also help that there is a lot of premium attached to reading and this behavior gets highly reinforced.

We should encourage the child engage daily with a plant, earth, water, flour, pasta etc. natural things than with the alphabet.