presented by the letter....

awhile ago my friend was talking about this method of teaching the ABCs. she said that it's better to not teach them in ABC order. i can understand because you don't want a kid to have to sing the ABC song while looking at a poster, just to see what the letter T looks like (however, i wonder if you just teach them in a different order, then maybe the same thing would happen....). she had a book that went along with it and each letter had a picture that would go along with it saying something like "many mice munching merrily" (obviously for letter M).
i thought it might be a good idea to teach the letters in a different order than this, but i didn't like the book she had because it was photocopied and some of the pages weren't too pretty and i'm pretty anal about the way things look sometimes. so i made up my own things, featuring pictures from magazines that start with the different letters (i actually haven't quite finished and if anyone has any ideas of easily obtainable magazine images for the letters U,K,N,V,E, J, W, Y, X, Q, Z, or O, please let me know. these ones have been hard to find. the only magazines i really have are 2 fitness magazines, one cosmo and a buttload of wedding magazines).
anyway, i also got to thinking about sesame street and how at the end of each episode, they'd have "brought to you by the letters T and E and the number 5" or something like that. and they never did the letters in order either. so now i'm copying sesame street and having a different letter of the day each day.
the way it works is this...i'll bring out the letter and ask if anyone knows what letter it is. then i'll say the letter a few times. then launch into this song that's from a great video that we have. it's kinda to the tune of "farmer in the dell" (i think) and goes like "the S says SSSS. the S says SSSS. every letter makes a sound. the S says SSSSS." and then i point to each of the pictures that i've put on there and say "SSS SSS Strawberry" etc.  and i hang the picture on the wall so that they can look at it whenever they feel like it.
so far the kids are really liking it, but since it's a new thing there's no way to know if it's completely effective yet.
Tags: esl, preschool, teaching ABCs

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