how to teach 2.10 yr old about Capital and lowercase letters

[LauraGas]

DS is 2.10. The last few weeks he has been almost obsessed with letters and knowing what they are and what word begins with them. He can recognise all letters of the alphabet - in captial letters. When we do drawing he mainly just wants me to write words for him. I'm keen to encourage this but am struggling with trying to explain about capital and lowercase letters. Is there a good way to do this so that he understands that the same letter comes in 2 formats? Not sure if there are any good books that anyone could recommend.

Just as an incidental, he can pick out all the letters of his name when asked - it's Joe. But, he insists that the O comes at the end. Can't get to the bottom of why, but think that it's maybe because that's the last sound of his name? Anyone have an experience of this?

start with say, 5 letters, vowels maybe and play mztching game.

i agree tho that most children won't want/need to know this for a long time yet.

I read this with interest as the primary school my son attends is in the outstanding ofsted list and usually in the top 150 of The Times 500 primary schools.

They have a HUGE emphasis on the child as an individual. They teach phonics (ELC's jollyphonics book with the CD to sing along to is a fantastic way to understand how they are taught) once they get to grips with phonics then they learn word recognition.

They have a home/school policy so they have sessions for the parents to attend so that we understand how they are taught, and what they are being taught. Ds1 is in yr1 and we had examples of not only stories written by below average, average and above average pupils but also we could see their handwriting and spelling.

It gives us as parents a better understanding of what the school is trying to teach and where our child should be aiming.

It is like maths, they do not teach mulitplication the way we were taught

I think if your child is asking questions then you answer them. My ds2 is not quite 3 and he watches Super Why on nick jr, they spell all their words in capitals this means that every time we walk somewhere my son jumps on the water meter grids and shouts double you ( W ) instead of wuh. I just say, yes wuh for water.

I bought a 'Jolly Phonics Stories' book yesterday from ELC. It's really good for explaining simply the principles behind the Jolly Phonics Programme. It also has really nice illustrations.

DD who is almost 4 is really enjoying looking at it.

I hate Super Why for the capitals and also for the digraphs. Ill conceived programme I think, my daughter who is 5 and knows her digraphs and can actually put the words/sentences together thinks it's boring and babyish my son who's 4 enjoys it but only has single letter sounds so cant access most of the words.

OMG he is 2 years old!!!! FFS!!! Great that he is interested in the letters - woohoo! But don't push him please - he has his whole life to obsess over grammar and vocab. Jaysus what is this world coming too

I actually think it v reasonable to ask advice on here about this. My dd2 was reciting the alphabet backwards aged 2 and loves playing her own games with the letters she sees around her, she is now 3.5 and can read quite a few words, sounding out by herself , she does understand about upper and lower case . DD1 is in yr 1 and can read fairly well. I waited with dd1 as much as possible because I wanted the support of the school and didn't want dd1 to have to unlearn my errors, but I can't wait until dd2 to starts school as its not until sept 2010 and she is v frustrated. She wants to read. We read a lot in this house and I think that she looks on it as tho what is in the books that she hasn't had read to her yet, is a secret being kept from her.

I can't hold her back even tho i'm loathe to be seen to be "pushing her forward".

Whatever I do I will be seen as doing too much or too little by one camp of opinion or the other.

I do have the support of her future class teacher who has asked me to continue as far as possible on the path that she is already on tho so that is exactly what I will do.

It does seem to be a difficult topic

DD is 3.6 and is taking an interest in letters and words. I am generally going along the phonics route, although DD's name has a letter C that makes an ssss sound and when she is trying to write her name I can never decide how to tell her which letter it is she needs.

Obviously hardly the most important thing in the world .

DS is 5.4 and wasn't interested at this age, although is now one of the "better" readers in his class. I have talked with his teacher about DD and seeing what the school's thoughts on things to do with reading are and I am also being told that what I am doing is fine.

Their school takes children into a mixed nursery/reception class the term after they are 4, so DD will start there in January 2010 which I think is good.

Thanks for all advice and for the constructive criticisms.

lionmummy - I am completely offended by your post. As I have stated already I am NOT pushing him. Just trying to answer the questions that he asks in the best way. To say "what is the world coming to" is way over the top. He is an extremely well loved, happy, healthy little boy, how dare you imply that they way I am bringing him up is wrong.

I wouldn't worry too much about Lionmummy - have always felt if you intend to criticise others for teaching spelling and grammar you should really try to get your own correct

Don't see any problem with 'muh' rather than 'mmmm' myself, we learnt perfectly well using it and my 5yr old has had no problems using that alongside Jolly Phonics. Jolly Phonics doesn't appeal to me, a Primary School teacher we know said it works well for the children that struggled with the old way of teaching but not all children really need it.

Fizzylemonade - would have to question just how much they value the individual if they use a blanket system of teaching reading. Not saying this is wrong, just absolutely no different to any other school.

Thank goodness for anonymous forums!

This reminds me of sitting in a restaurant with a friend who announced that she had never had any problems with either of her children's behaviour.

I was so sure someone would come up behind her and clout her with a frying pan!

I guess it's fun to enjoy your child's abilities so long as you don't mistake early letter learning for long-term potential intelligence

you can also play 'odd one out', 'which letter is missing', 'put them in order' but only with 3 - 5 letters at a time and the same 3 or 5 till they grasp the concept of big letter little letter.

fgs.... we're not teaching them to read, we're trying to find the correct way of answering the questions they have asked us.

i have an older child who can barely recognise 2 letters! and tbh, i'm more at ease with that than a 2 year old who can spell out the name of every shop we pass

i didn't learn to read until almost 8 due to my parents dragging me from country to country but within a year of learning i was head and shoulders above others my age and had a voracious appetite for books so i have no doubt that later is better when it comes to reading

HOWEVER if my child is asking me a question i answer it truthfully.... and if he is interested and asking to read small words then i'm damned if i'm going to tell him 'sorry ds1... you're too little, come back to me on your fifth birthday'

This has been interesting reading. I hated phonics as a child - had a real gut reaction to it, and constantly argued about exceptions, like the right little PITA I was. I apparently wouldn't contemplate reading until I was 5, and then just took to it - in a big way, I guess, since I went on to do a PhD in English Language.

And when you just watch children acquire language and develop grammar - generating words like runned and sheeps and broked, I cannot bring myself to worry too much about her having to "unlearn" things at school.

I like the idea of big J and little J; does he ask any more questions beyond that?

sorry I may be standing myself in front of a firing squad here, but I am teaching my daughter who is 3.5 to read.

Why? Because THAT is what she wants to do. I know children who like all sorts of things and know all sorts of facts about them - I once knew a 3 yr old boy who had a book about planes, he couldn't read, but he knew the name, top speed, last flight date, etc etc of every plane in that book because he just wanted to know and so his parents told him, I know boys who are fantastic at kicking footballs aged 2 because that is what they want to do and their parents supported them in the direction they want to go in.

My daughter asks me every day to teach her to read the books on the bookshelf.

She loves doing loads of other things too, and I know that in the long run it will matter very little whether she learns to read aged 3.5 or 7.2 as long as she does in the end, but she is interested now. I work on the basis that if a child is interested in something which is a positive thing then their interest should be encouraged or at least supported.

If my daughter suddenly decides that she doesn't want to play phonics games then we won't do them, she is the instigator. There is no stress involved, it doesn't matter how fast she progresses because she doesn't need to do it yet, she just wants to.

I don't see any difference between learning to read and learning anything else. I don't understand why others on here are so stressed about the issue. I could understand it on the circumcision thread, but not on here, please feel free to enlighten me, but please don't shoot at me because I'm a bit slow at ducking ATM!!

Interested to read MilaMae's posts. Here in Spain they start school in their 3rd year. Because of how the month fell ds was 2.10 when he started school and they started Jolly Phonics immediately in english class, and the spanish equivalent in spanish class (which incidentally teaches capitals first, and different letter shapes ie script rather than block) . Naturally I think my ds is the most brilliant child in the world!!, however realistically he is a normal bright and interested boy, not Einstein, and he found it all to be fine. No confusion with concepts, because the English/spanish were clearly separated by different teachers, books and rooms, he could differentiate between caps/lower and didn't mix them (much!), and the same seems to be true for his classmates.

True, fine motor skills at that age are not as refined as they are later so formation of letters is a bit wonkier in the early days, but he's 4.5 now and writing clearly and neatly.

Sorry, am trying not to come across as "well MY child can do this neh neh neh", but it's really hard to balance pride in ds with trying to show that if it's well taught it isn't necessarily damaging to go into detail at that age!

Having said all that, we vowed that if at any point ds struggled or wasn't happy being taught in such a structured way we would take him out of school, we are both british and used to the idea of starting structured schooling 2 years later, but it didn't arise.

I am a bit confused by what seems to be the implied message that parents are irresponsibly "teaching" their children capital letters and making teachers' jobs more difficult.

If you want children to arrive in Reception without a knowledge of capital letters I suggest tackling the people who decide that street names, car numberplates, most shop signs and the initial letters of friends' names are all capitals. That's where children see letters, and short of sedating them into a semi-catatonic state that's where they are going to ask about them first.

IME any "teaching" that's done is in trying to get them to realise that there are also lowercase letters.

i also think some posters are being het up over nothing.

the child wants to learn something, then use it as a vehicle to fill his day, have some one to one communication with him, expand his curious mind, teach him to love learning.

it doesn't matter that the thing is about letters.

It won't affect what and how they learn in school later. In fact the things i mentioned above will enhance their teachability (not a word I think) later.

Habibu, (also an English grad here) You probably know this anyway but for the benefit of others: I love it when children make up their own words. It shows that they have grasped the grammatical rule of past tense, plural, etc when they come out with things like 'childrens' and 'runned'. they correct themselves naturally too later on so the teacher doesn't have to unteach them anything. This is the fascinating thing about the human mind. Learning something one way doesn't make the teacher's job later on.

My DD had fun using a keyboard. The capitals are on the keyboard and the lower case equivalent comes up on the screen.

Jolly Phonics DVD is great too.

Just go back and start saying the sounds rather than the names.

I am currenty trying to sort out sounds for a year 1 boy who knew all his letter names and no sounds - means, for him, he has made very little progress in phonics and is finding reading very difficuly. So I am tying to now teach him that all these letters he knew have a sound or two attached to them too and that it is these sounds that make up words. The names are just names, nothing more and def not their to help us read.

Agree, foxy - I studied child language acquisition as an undergrad, but didn't really "get" it until I heard my own dd generating her own grammar - was so delighted when I heard "sheeps" and "runned" because it is, as you say, demonstrably a generation, rather than simply repetition of what she'd heard, and it really is just fascinating.

I can't imagine it's going to be so very different with written language/graphemes, etc - it's not so much unlearning as expanding knowledge.

i'm still at a lose to understand this jolly phonics thing.... how is it so bad for them to learn the name and the sound of each letter?

they need to learn the name at some point, they can't spell out someones name in their 20's using letter sounds fgs, and we all learned both and judging by the fact we're all posting messages on an internet forum we clearly learned to read well enough

ds1 is showing no signs of having trouble grasping the concept of 'it's called C and it sounds like this... cuh'. i've explained to him that words use differant sounds and every sound has a letter so that when we write down the letters we know what sounds the word makes. he's delighted with this concept

PT. I don't think it is bad to learn both. Some children however find it difficult to learn both. A child with learning disabilities or a low IQ may struggle to learn both simultaneously, for example so at every stage of learning, a child's response needs to be assessed by the teacher (or mother) to make sure that a child is not being overloaded and it can also for this reason, may make the parent an unsuitable teacher as if the parent cannot step back and evaluate how a child is learning then the parent may be doing the child or him/her self no favours.

I have as a secondary teacher met a lot of children, mostly in lower sets, some with learning difficulties and some without, who only know the sound of a letter and not the name of the letter. I can see where a child can benefit from just learning the sound but if a child is bright enough to learn both sound and name and to learn them one after the other, or side by side (same with upper and lower cases) then why not?

This is why I said that at first, it can be easier to just teach the child 3-5 letters at a time, whatever you are doing because once they grasp the 'concept' of what you are trying to teach, the child can generate the rest with v. little imput from the teacher/parent.

thanks for that answer foxytocin... i hadn't thought of it like that, although i'm shocked at teenagers having such trouble grasping simple reading skills. in all my years in school i never came across anything like that, my best friend in primary was severly dyslexic but even she wasn't as far behind as the kids you describe... it's quite sad

we did in a way do it a few letters at a time as he asked one letter first, B, and i told him and a few days later he started pointing out B's everywhere, next he learned E because he pointed at one and said 'B' so i corrected him, then it gradually progressed without me paying too much attention until we were sat in the doctors surgery one day and he pulled out an alphabet book and proceeded to tell me every single letter except G and Z at that point it occured to me he was slightly unusual! he's since started asking about whole words hence the conversation about sounds i described. he can recognise all the letters in upper and lower case as i bought him a book that shows both alongside each other.

every now and then in year 8 I teach a kid how to read an analog clock. i teach MFL so we teach how to tell time and then they learn how! just last year I taught a boy how to tell time. imo he has missed a lot in earlier years but I believe it was a mixture of home and school environment and less about aptitude why he has missed a lot.