Letter Recognition Activities for Young Learners

Alphabetic recognition is sometimes called letter recognition or letter identification, but all three terms have the same meaning. Letter recognition activities refer to the ability to visually recognize letters of the alphabet through hands-on learning.

Image of letters of the alphabet with text "Why Teach Letter Recognition"

Researchers and experienced teachers agree that effective alphabetic recognition or letter identification is a careful balance of both explicit instruction of specific letters and frequent exposure to those letters in multiple forms, both isolated and within text.

Letter recognition is important because it enables beginning readers to work out how printed text is related to spoken language.Having a mastery of letter names can make learning letter sounds easier for young readers. The sounds of many letter names are closely related to the letter sounds. For example, say “d” and you will hear the /d/ sound. Say “m” and you will hear the /m/ sound. Many letters of the alphabet follow this, so even while focusing on letter recognition, children are also being exposed to and learning letter sounds.

This is why alphabetic recognition is one of the very first skills children learn as beginning readers. It comes before phonemic awareness and decoding.

LETTER RECOGNITION ACTIVITIES

Below are some simple suggestions to engage young learners.

1. SING THE ALPHABET

2. READ THE ALPHABET

This is a useful post from Megan at Many Little Joys:

12 AWESOME ALPHABET BOOKS TO START THE SCHOOL YEAR RIGHT

3. WRITE THE ALPHABET

4. BUILD THE ALPHABET

5. ENVIRONMENTAL PRINT

Your child can have fun learning to read even when books are not available. Environmental print provides lots of opportunities for kids to interact with letters.

Ideas:

Cereal boxes are colorful and interesting to look at. Ask your child to find the first letter of his name somewhere on the box. See if he can find other letters from his name too.
Gather lots of pictures of signs and words from items within the house, you can sort these items by beginning letter. A simple alphabet book can be created using all your cutouts by organizing all the A words, B words, C words, etc.

You can find lots of play ideas for environmental print at PreK Pages:

IDEAS FOR USING ENVIRONMENTAL PRINT

6. INTERACTIVE GAMES

Image of children playing a letter recognition game on a mobile device.

These letter recognition games should not only be fun for the student, but provide repeated practice in recognizing the letters of the alphabet. in lower case, upper case and mixed cases. Students are rewarded with a spinning star and a smile when they identify the correct letters. (To avoid students being moved on to the next slide automatically when clicking on a wrong answer, I have had to include sad faces). All clicks are accompanied by some fun audio!Once the slide show is set up by the teacher, the student should be able to progress through the game independently. They may require help until they develop confidence in the technical aspects of using the game.

This game is also useful for intervention and assessment.
I have intentionally created the game in black and white to allow the teacher to print as a worksheet. Students can cover the correct letters with manipulatives, such as counters.