Back to School Review: When Should I Teach my Child the Alphabet?

With kids heading back to school soon, you may be wondering about your child’s academic progress. Today I’m sharing a review of a book that could answer some of your questions. When Should I Teach my Child the Alphabet? is a book by Nicola Lott outlining some ideas to help your child from birth to kindergarten have a healthy start to literacy. It is easily scanned for your child’s particular age group and easy enough to read in one sitting. The points are broken up into 21 steps and encourage parents, caregivers, and interested parties in a child’s life to help give them the building blocks for lifelong literacy.

Back to School: Why Early Literacy?

From about the time you conceive a child people start asking you questions and comparing the growth, motor skills and cognitive milestones in all the books and websites around. Almost as soon as they are starting to make sounds there are tons of products that claim to “teach” your baby to read. This is not one of the products that make unreasonable claims, it is a short book aimed at demystifying how early literacy generally works in children. Each of the sections has several ideas to help grow literacy in your child. These activities and ideas will help to ready your child for reading and heading back to school. It will also help those not in an educational field understand how much your child is learning.

What I Liked

I like that this book still encourages parents to read picture books with their children. In my experience as an elementary educator children in all grades still get something from picture books. If you think about it, even as adults we know that pictures are a huge part of our own literacy. The web sites and magazine articles and blogs that we read are all more readable and catch our attention more easily if they have an accompanying picture.

I understand why this book doesn’t encourage introducing the alphabet until step 17 as a preschooler/kindergartener, but as with anything to do with children, all children are different and may be ready for learning letters earlier or later. The good news is that you can use this book as a guideline to help.

Where to Buy

If you would like to buy When Should I Teach my Child the Alphabet? in time for back to school you can get it through Notch Hill Learning. It is available in e-book and soft cover formats.