Teaching letter and number recognition

I just typed you a long long answer to this outlining how to do this teaching effectively, and the machine ate my homework. :twisted:
**&^^%% :evil:

You need to present one thing at a time and go step by step. He won’t get the whole alphabet at once and is probably confused by too much input. Rather, present one letter at a time, two or three a week, with constant review of everything done before. You’ll get there in time, and a solid foundation and progress is better than fast failure.

I will try to retype the detailed outline later.

You might want to try supplementing with one of the Sound Reading CDs from http://www.soundreading.com . These CDs are very good and might help. Most children enjoy working with them too.

I would also suggest that you start having him “map” the letters to the sounds. The book “Reading Reflex” by McGuiness describes this. Basically, he would use a white board and marker to write each sound as he says each sound. This approach is more valuable than flash cards because of the multi-sensory inputs: i.e., he is saying the sound, hearing the sound, writing the sound, and seeing the sound all at one time.

Another thing you can try is a mini-trampoline and homemade posters. He would start by jumping on the trampoline, and then would say each sound in order on the poster every other jump, then every jump. You could start out with perhaps just two or three of the letters he is having trouble learning. After he is good with those, make a new poster with one more sound in it. This type of physical activity is especially helpful for children with sensory integration disorders.

Nancy

I have just posted

Beginning the alphabet and reading — long long how-to

on the Teaching Reading page,

This is a detailed step-by-step teaching guide to getting a grip on helping the problem of the student who doesn’t know the alphabet.

I hope you go there and read it — that was a lot of typing!

Thanks for the replies (and yes I’m going to read that one V, thanks for taking the time to redo it).

Another question…

He is raring to read. He is trying to start reading. Should I wait until he knows all of his ABC’s before I start him reading or can I do it on a what he knows basis?

The answer to the last question is a definite maybe.

Please, please DON’T teach him to guess at the word by looking at it and divining the answer from the general shape or worse yet by looking away from the word and at the picture. This is a recipe for continued trouble later.

On the other hand, you can get a simple pre-primer with very limited vocabulary and teach the letters in the order needed for the words. For example, the book I use has:
page 1 — Peter
page 2 — Jane
page 3 — Peter and Jane
page 4 — here is Peter and here is Jane
page 5 — here is the dog

So, you can teach p (lower case; capitals later), e, t, and r and teach Peter; add j, a, and n and teach Jane; add d and teach and; add h, i, and s and teach here and is; add th as a unit and teach the, add o and g and teach dog. And so on. As you go on, you learn the most common letters early and fairly fast — fourteen in the above list — and add the less common more gradually. So go really, really slowly at first, take time and get these first steps right. Maybe a couple of days or even a week on each page. Have no fear, once you get this foundation solid then you build up to a good speed surprisingly soon.

Thank you Victoria. You are so smart and always willing to help.

I was thinking the same thing. I haven’t been sure in what order to teach the alphabet and was using Hooked On Phonics because I had it left from my other son’s using it. It isn’t working though because like you said, the set I have is teaching them the upper and lowercase letters all at once and it’s just too much for him to absorb.

I will be honest, I was gifted in school and picked everything up really easily. I have been getting a little frustrated and worried that it is taking him so long to learn such a basic concept like the alphabet and numbers to 9 (we’re using math u see so they go to 9 to start with). But now I realize that this is part of why I pulled him out of public school…so he can learn at his own pace. And you are right, if I mess this up now I’ll be unteaching and trying to reteach for a long time to come.

Thanks again for all the help everyone.

I was actually almost happy to read your post. I was beginning to feel like my duaghter was the only one who can’t figure out the alphabet or numbers! However, I am sorry your son is struggling through it as well.

Christie is almost 7 and has a really hard time. We’re in the middle of assessments right now. We also homeschool our kids. We started using a program called Sounds Abound found at www.linguisystems.com

It is the first program that has worked. She’s actually figured out the ‘M’ (we’ve been working on that for over a year), S and C. You take 5 days to work on each letter and all types of different sensory approaches are used. Flashcards, pictures, sand, paint, colouring, etc. I highly recommend it.

I ask Christie how old she is and she has to count it out on her fingers first and then tells us she’s 6. To give you some hope, after all the trying with letters and taking it very slow she suddenly learned 6 words a couple weeks ago. She doesn’t know the letters that are in them but just knows them by site. The words are “I”, “love”, “you”, “mom”, “dad” and “zoo”. It was so exciting to get my first I love you note from her. Now she spends hours a day writing those words over and over again!

Jeannie

Thank you Jeannie. I could really use some hope right about now.

We sat down with a really basic book today. We are learning the letter B and it was about lively butterflies where another one is added on each page and it goes from 1-10. That is when I realized that the work that I was doing trying to teach him sight words worked somewhat. He doesn’t know what the letters are, but he knows the words “the” and “a” (he knows that letter now) :-)

It is just so such slow going. And I didn’t realize that so much of first grade revolves around the child being able to write. Daniel is starting to realize that he doesn’t write well at all and he is starting to fight doing it. I think it is a good idea to teach him the letters by sight, sound, touch, and writing. I’m trying everything I can think of to get the stuff to stick inside his head. It seems to be working like a rusted steel trap. It’s hard to get his mind around it, but once it snaps shut it’s in there for the duration.

Yes yes yes! That’s my daughter exactly! Of course she learned the word “the” and then 2 weeks later it was gone. However, the other words that she has learned seem to be there for good.

I’ve never figured out how you can recognize a word and not know the letters that are in it but somehow it works. It’s tough for them when they start to realize that other kids can read and they can’t. Thankfully God gave my little one a wonderfully sunny personality so it doesn’t bug her too much.

We’ve been working on the alphabet for 1 1/2 years now and she knows about 6 letters but doesn’t have a clue to their sounds so I’ve given up formal teaching for that part. Now we just work on the names.

Think about giving up on the names, and just teaching the sounds. (THat is what I have done with older nonreaders who also took a year to get those sounds down; we practiced reading words, too, so it wasn’t all in isolation.)

http://www.auburn.edu/~murraba has a lot of really good information and strategies for teaching reading.

Thank you Sue. I will be checking that link momentarily.

Jeannie, Daniel did two years of public school kindergarten and didn’t get the ABCs and 123s. We are still working on them now. I think part of it is that he needs a lot of one on one attention to make certain that he is doing things correctly. I stay on top of him to try to make sure that he isn’t learning the wrong thing the wrong way. It’s like Victoria says, better to teach it correctly the first time than to have to go back and unteach and reteach.

I also realized that I wasn’t doing enough to reinforce what he was learning. I always thought that the little nick-nacks they made in school were just to eat up time. I have found out that doing those little projects helps build skills they need as well as reinforcing what they are being taught. Like for B I spotted a little thing at WalMart for like $3 that was a kit to make little bears (the pack has enough to make mamma, papa, and baby). We made one of the bears and while we were doing it we were talking about how the word bear starts with the B sound. Low and behold he started calling out other words that start with B. I think we may have made a connection. I also bought some beads for him to string into necklaces and buttons for us to play with also.

I am so proud, I am seeing that he is learning. I was beginning to think that I was doing it all wrong and hurting more than helping. What a relief it is.

I’ve tried so hard to teach sounds but they just don’t go into her brain. Christie knows what a ‘C’ is but even though it starts her name she can’t ever remember the sound it makes. She’s been writing out her name for 4 years now but if I sound it out slowly she can’t figure out that I’m saying her name. If she can’t learn it in 4 years, well I’m thinking maybe I need to just leave that part for another year or so… maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know. Your opinions??

Do not move on until he has mastered them.

Reading:

Finding a multi-sensory approach to concept introduction is important. I use Orton-Gillingham and I think it is great.

You also need to review constantly but not simply ‘drill’. I like the Orton-Gillingham 3 Part Drill. It is short and sweet but it works.

Math:

Numbers need to be introduced multi-sensorally also. I have heard good things about touch math www.touchmath.com.

Go get some soft number mats and play games with 0-9. Keep it interesting, fun and active.

I would also look into auditory processing issues. Having a full evaluation seems to be in order. You need to find out exactly what her weaknesses are.

Melissa

This thread just popped back up with a new post and I was wondering — JeannieM and obesestatistic, do you have my “one letter at a time” teaching outlines? I find that most program failures come from trying to do too much at once, so I wrote up some lesson plans and descriptions of how to make materials for a good beginning. I also posted a long outline on teaching those high-frequency words with a multisensory mulitfaceted approach. If you don’t have the updated ideas, (or if you don’t have my notes at all) please email me a request at [email protected].

Has anyone tried the Leap Frog videos or DVDs? The Leap Frog Letter Factory is supposed to be *very* helpful for teaching letter sounds. There are two others that are supposed to be very good too. Have heard these are available at places such as Walmart and Target for about $11 each. I would definitely use these with a child having difficulty making sound/symbol associations.

Nancy

Nancy2, my experience with commercial products such as these is that, although they may be of some assistance as *supplementary* materials for a kid who is learning OK in some other way, they are simply too much info all at once and far, far too many distractors. If the child has not already started to learn the basics for one reason or another, either age or some difficulty, it is very unlikely that he will start to learn in this way.

I understand where you are coming from, Victoria, but I do think the Leap Frog Letter Factory is worth a try for the following child.

“Christie knows what a ‘C’ is but even though it starts her name she can’t ever remember the sound it makes. .”

A number of parents with children who have had difficulty learning and retaining sound/symbol correlations have posted progress with the Leap Frog DVD/video.

I believe the letter “c”, for example, is in a classroom of shivering c’s saying it’s “c-c-c-c-old”.

The two other Leap Frog DVDs are supposed to be helpful also (I think one is Word Factory — makes simple CVC words).

If nothing else, Letter Factory is an easy way to provide some reinforcement. I did not mean to imply that they would constitute a reading program.

Nancy

Well, many of the kids I work with would look at the classroom full of shivering c’s and start a long story about how the heat broke down in their classroom, and still nbever remember a c. Others would make a game of it and do it’s h-h-h-hot and then next time think c stands for /h/. Still others would play along with the story but the next time they looked at a c still draw a blank because their mind was on the shivering, and they say “uh … sh?”
This is what I mean by way, way too many distractors.
Again, nothing wrong with this kind of thing as a supplement for the kid who is already starting to catch on a bit. But the kid who is really fundamentally not getting symbols generally just gets worse when you add another symbolic layer.

after having Christie tested they’ve discovered that her long term memory is at about 2% of where it should be. She even forgets that she’s just eaten a really big meal not 10 minutes after she’s gotten up.

We’ve tried the leap pad products but they don’t seem to have accomplished anything. Right now we’re working with Linguisystems ‘Sounds Abound’ program. Using that we have gotten her to retain a few letters and their sounds. Other letters she remembers the sound and not the name, and others she remember the name and not the sound. In all she has about 7 partial letters. The rest are still just a very large mystery to her.

We’ve decided to give it up for now unless she directly asks. This year for school she is raising a puppy. That’s it. I figure next year when she’s older she’ll hopefully retain a little more.

Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions though. I am learning new ways to teach her next year.

Jeannie

JeannieM — well, your reply is exactly what I was talking about concerning the kid who is just not getting it. The extra layer of mnemonic tricks just adds another layer to forget in your case.
If you haven’t gotten my notes yet, please do ask, [email protected]
The outlines #1.5, 1.6, and 1.8, detailed lesson plans that I’ve added about teaching one letter at a time with multisensory methods, and about high-frequency words, are exactly what you need to work on developong memory of symbols. it will be very very slow to start but persever and you can improve memory bit by bit.