Shanist,
What you describe isn’t uncommon for 4-year-old children. Learning things in order is difficult.

Practice counting objects every day. Make fun. Put up a chart that counts to 10. Point to each number as you count. Count jumps. Count hugs. Count crackers during snack time. Count, count, count. Start with counting to 10 and only when your child has that down well, move onto to counting to 20. Keep counting but don’t worry if it takes time for your child to be able to count in order alone. A couple of my kids couldn’t count past 20 well until they were 5 or 5 1/2. It takes time.

Do similar play with the alphabet. Get an ABC chart and point to each letter as you sing the alphabet sound. Do it every day. Make a fun pointer stick for your son to point with. Get Refrigerator Magnets and put them in order together, comparing to the chart. Practice and play with the alphabet again and again. In time, he will learn alphabetical order. But again, like counting, it will take time. Many children do not master alphabetical order until 6-years-old and some are even older.

I hope this helps. Keep up the great work. I’d love to hear how it goes over the next few weeks.

What a great way to look at it, Mrs. A! Yes, there is no harm in covering concepts in different ways and there can be a lot of benefits.

Shannon,
It is easier to teach a child when you have his interest. Hopefully, one or more of these activities help get your little one interested. However, sometimes just waiting a bit is okay too. One of my kids had no interest in letters for a long while, then suddenly learned them all (upper and lower case) in a month when she was 5 and a half.

Amanda,
Feeding the puppy is a great activity! And the blank “bones” in the download allows you to use it for all sorts of review, including math. Have lots of fun!

Annie,
I’m glad you like these activities for learning the alphabet. You may also like our ABC animal crafts. It has a fun (and easy!) craft for every letter of the alphabet.

Tricia,
It’s a great activity! We hope your son enjoys it as much as we have.

Trixie,
Did you have any specific questions or concerns we can help you with?

It is often very helpful to start students with the reading readiness skills, especially phonological awareness, even if they are below 1st or 2nd grade.

You are welcome, Kathy. I hope your daughter and her child enjoy these activities!

Kay,
We don’t have a ready-made template for making fabric lower case letters and numbers, but we do explain the process for making your own template at the bottom of our fabric letter blog post.

Amy,
Teaching only the letter sounds seems logical, but the research doesn’t uphold the idea. Rather, research into reading shows clearly that children that know letter names and are very familiar with the alphabet have less difficulties learning to read than those that learn only letter sounds.

However, children do need to be taught letter sounds in addition to letter names. Our Pre-reading level goes through the alphabet three times. First the capital letters, learning the names. Then the lower case letters, matching them to the capital and reinforcing the names. Then, finally, learning the most common sound for each letter. Then All About Reading 1 builds upon that, reteaching the most common sound for three or four letters at a time and then having the student read words formed from letters they have learned.

In this way, children move into reading /k/-/ă/-/t/ with no problems.

Meghan,
These activities should help. However, children that struggle to learn letters do well to focus on just 3 or 4 at a time. Use these activities and play other games with just those 3 or 4 letters. Only once your child has mastered those well, add 3 more but keep the first 3 or 4 in regular review. I hope this helps. Let us know if you have questions.

Julie,
Our Pre-reading level is appropriate for Pre-K or K students, it just depends on the student and his or her needs. We have a placement test for it to determine if your student is ready.

Aimee,
“Motivation to Read”, check! He has at least one of the Top 5 Reading Readiness Skills down. :D

Temalesi,
We do not have songs and rhymes in our program. The only song we use is the ABC song, and we play with rhymes and rhyming to develop phonological awareness, but we don’t use songs and rhymes for rules or teaching.

Anya,
Have fun!

Sarah,
This made me smile! Thanks for sharing it.

Melissa,
Thank you so much for taking the time to tell us this! How wonderful that he could have such success with our Pre-reading level!

Nichole,
We tried on two different computers and two different printers, and we had no trouble printing the Alphabet Progress Chart. If you haven’t been successful already, you may try restarting your computer and printer. If that doesn’t solve the problem, you may need to google your printer model and the exact wording of the error message you are receiving.

I’m sorry we weren’t able to help more with this difficulty.