Letter Recognition and Discrimination

PreK and Kindergarten Students Need A Strong Phonemic Awareness Instruction

Is Letter Recognition Important?

Is it really important? Letter names are difficult for our students to learn. It would just be easier to have them learn the letter sounds so then they could decode a word. I know this has crossed your mind as you have prepared your lessons. As a Kindergarten teacher, I wondered about this very thing. There are 52 letters students need to learn to recognize and discriminate!

Early on in the history of Education, letter recognition has been a part of the foundation of teaching students to read. According to Reading Rockets, if children know letter names and sound when they begin 1^st  grade, they are more likely to be successful in learning to read. So PreK and Kindergarten grades become important for helping children learn to recognize and discriminate letter names and sounds.

Children and Letter Discrimination

While in PreK, children get to study the shapes of letters. At this young age, children have trouble discriminating between letters with similar shapes. It is common to confuse b, d, p. I've had students have difficulty telling apart the a and d. The d is like the letter a,  only with a long spine. The only difference between the letters i and j is the tail the j has.

Some letters have similar shapes.

When the students come to us at the beginning of the school year, they come to us from varied places in the world of letter knowledge. Including, being able to tell the letters apart. It becomes our job to find different ways to help them grow and learn. We create a Print-Rich Environment in our classrooms, and we plan our lessons so that our students are exposed to letter names, discriminate one letter from the other, and learn the sounds.

I have created several teaching resources that I have used with my own students to help them become proficient.

 

Amped Up Learning

Teachers Pay Teachers

This packet will help your students learn how to make the letters of the alphabet and make a connection to words that begin with each letter sound. The letters they will trace are large letters. There are picture cues to help them with initial sounds. There are two pictures on each letter page, one picture is a tracing picture to help the students strengthen their fine motor skills. View this video to get a better idea of what else is part of this teaching resource.

Now, in Kindergarten, they discriminate a letter from a group of letters. The ability to do this is a basic foundation of reading.

Amped Up Learning

Teachers Pay Teachers

This packet can help your students discriminate each individual letter. A-Z Letter Find is a great way for your young students to master letter recognition. There is a printable page for each letter. On each letter page, they will discriminate the upper and lowercase letters from a group of letters. 

!. Provide different opportunities for your students to observe, feel, and sort letters by shape.

2. Provide fun moments when they can make letters with construction paper, play dough, slime, etc.

3. Provide time for working on letter formation.

4. Provide activities geared at telling letters apart.

Teachers continue doing the amazing job you do!

Debbie - Froggy About Teaching

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