Choosing Alphabet posters, cards or books for your little one

I was looking at the 'Huggies' website the other day and I noticed that they had some alphabet cards to print out. Fantastic except for a few of their choices of  words to go with the letters. When children learn the alphabet they need to learn both the letter

names and the sounds that they make eg "this is the letter A (aye) it makes an 'a' sound  like in the word apple". To avoid confusion for young children when they are learning their alphabet it is better if alphabet resources have pictures that start with the sound not the letter name such as a-apple, b-bat, e-egg, g -goat, j-jet etc. Choices I would avoid for a young child learning their alphabet are things like e - Eeyore or e-eel, or o-oak , o-owl, or g-giraffe. In these examples the first sound in the word is not the typical sound that the child needs to associate with the letter when they move to sounding out words. It is better to teach the general rules and then later bring in the exceptions, otherwise it can get too confusing for the child.

Often when assessing a child with literacy difficulties I found that the older child with difficulties was the one trying to sound out words using their letter names. bee-aye- tea --try getting bat out of that!

Letters have names -they do not change, but letters can make different sounds. Start with the most usual sound and then later you can teach the exceptions.