You may not believe it, but babies are born with some level of literacy. In the womb, babies hear their mother’s voice, and other sounds, and they begin to hear words as soon as they are born. The importance of language development and the role it plays in literacy is undisputed. Alphabet games are a great way of helping kids with their literacy from an early age.
By the age of 2, most children will be ready to learn the alphabet and may sing along with the alphabet song. Some will be able to recognize and point out the letters of the alphabet in alphabet books. However, they are not yet aware of sounds and their relation to the letters. This understanding will begin to develop from around age 3 – 4.
It might seem like age 2 is too early and unrealistic for children to begin learning the letters of the alphabet, but starting way before your child can actually understand will give them a head start in learning to recognize and read the alphabet.
If you wish to start your children on learning the alphabet early, these alphabet games in kindergarten will come in handy.
Road Trip Letter Hunt
This game is perfect for long car trips where the children can easily get bored with nothing to keep them occupied. What’s more, you don’t need to buy anything to play this game, and the entire family can get involved. Before heading out of the house, grab at least two alphabet game boards or free alphabet worksheets.
During the trip, challenge your children to look around everything you drive past and find letters on billboards, signposts, buildings, and even other vehicles. Make it a race to see who finds all 26 letters first, and every time someone finds a letter, place a mark or sticker on the alphabet board. This is a great way to improve literacy at any age whenever you are in the car!
Pasta Letter Match
It is important that children learn to differentiate between lowercase and uppercase letters. For this game, you will need an alphabet board, and uncooked alphabet pasta. If you don’t have an alphabet board, you can easily print one out from the web. Instruct kids to match the uncooked pasta to the letters on the alphabet board. If the children successfully match the letters on the board, you can switch them up with lowercase letters and see how well they do.
Magnet Matching
For this game, you will need some letter magnets, and a white board. On the whiteboard, write uppercase and lowercase letters, and then ask your children to look through the magnetic alphabets and match the letters to the ones written on the whiteboard. Keep them at the exercise until every letter has been matched, and then get them started on another set of letters on the whiteboard.
Plastic Egg Letter Hunt
Make the Easter egg hunt a fun and educating time for your children. All you need are your plastic eggs and a permanent marker. Write lowercase letters at the bottom shell of the eggs, and uppercase letters on the top shell. Hide the separate halves all around the house or classroom, and let the children hunt for the egg halves and match the uppercase letters with the lowercase. Turn this into a fun competition to see which child gets the most eggs.
There are so many ways your children can learn the letters of the alphabet in a fun and engaging way. Start with some of these alphabet games in kindergarten, and children will be able to practice their letter recognition skills.
We hope you like these ideas for alphabet games; we would love to hear how you get on with them, or if you have any other ideas as well. We do have more ideas for literacy on the site, so do check out these articles too if you have time:
Literacy ideas on KiddyCharts
Here are some of the resources that we have on KiddyCharts to help improve kids literacy, including some writing prompts for them.
Easter writing worksheets and eBook
Worksheets with an Easter theme, including writing prompts and literacy ideas for your children.
Positive writing prompts for kids emotional development #31DaysOfLearning
Positive writing prompts to encourage good thoughts, as well as good literacy!
End of year journalling and writing prompts for kids
This is an excellent activity to help kids to look back on what has happened to them. You can adapt for other times of year, not just as an end of year activity.
There are also some other sites that have great articles around this topic, so do check these out as well:
15+ Reading Strategies for Unknown Words {Tips for Parents}
FREE Reading Tips Brochure - to Parents from Teachers
10 Ways to improve reading fluency
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Thanks, as always, for stopping by, and we do hope to see you again soon as well,
Helen
This is a partnered post.
Helen
Helen is a mum to two, social media consultant, and website editor; and this site is (we think) the only Social Enterprise parenting magazine! Since giving up being a business analyst when juggling travel, work and kids proved too complicated, she founded KiddyCharts so she could be with her kids, and use those grey cells at the same time. KiddyCharts has reach of over 1.1million across social and the site. The blog works with big family brands (including travel) to help promote their services, as well as offering free resources to parents of kids under 10. It gives 51%+ profits to Reverence for Life, who fund a number of important initiatives in Africa, including bringing running water and basic equipment to a school in Tanzania. Helen has worked as a digital marketing consultant (IDM qualified) with various organisations, including Channel Mum, Truprint, Talk to Mums, and Micro Scooters. She loves to be creative in the brand campaigns she works on. Get in touch TODAY!