Encouraging letter recognition in every day life experiences

When out shopping encourage your child to recognise letter and numbers. Choose a letter or number of the day, and play a game with your child to seek out the letter or number selected. Look at shop signs, road signs, and advertising boards. This will give your child lots of experience in recognising letters and numbers in different fonts and typefaces, much the same way as they would learn to recognise dogs and birds of different varieties.

You may find you child will take control of the game and start finding additional letters to the nominated letter of the day as they grow more and more confident in their letter recognition. This should be encouraged and do make sure to heap extra praise on your child for doing more than is asked from them.

This technique also involves the child in everyday activities and helps them from becoming bored and disruptive during shopping trips.

As the child becomes more accomplished you can adapt the game, so that a child then has to guess the letter a product begins with. If you are buying bananas, emphasise the B sound at the start of the word and ask your child to guess what letter the word begins with.

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