Learning One’s ABCs

At age 4, PK students are introduced to the letters of the English alphabet: A-B-C-D-E-F-G…we all can remember the ABC song, learning letters watching Sesame Street or Barney, using flashcards, writing big letters on lined sheets of paper, and other activities in and out of school (including one pictured here from our remote learning environement, where PK students were asked to use household objects to practice making letters).

 

At Brimmer, teachers and administrators can peek into the School’s curriculum maps and see the content and methodology our Early Childhood teachers use to instruct their students in their ABCs. For example:

 

Week 1: Letter of the week—what sound does it make? What does it look like? 

 

Formation of uppercase letters—children recognize the letter sound and familiar words that begin with that sound.

 

Learning activity: Children will pull objects out of a bag and name the object that begins with that letter.

 

Week 2: Letters and numbers: What is the alphabet ? How many letters are in the alphabet? What letters are in my name? How many letters are in my name?

 

Children will be able to identify letters in their name. Children will be able to spell/recite their name, e.g., " M, I , L , A ... Mila”

 

Learning Activities: Name Puzzles, Picture Name Match, Name Graph, Letter Search, Name Stamping

 

The teaching of the alphabet involves multiple senses and a variety of activities that work with diverse learning styles and make the learning fun.

 

Teaching of the alphabet continues and advances in Kindergarten and introduces rhyming, identification of sounds, sight words, and counting of syllables. Then in first grade the students learn how letters work together to form sounds—phonics!—and decode words and gain meaning. They continue to develop their vocabulary, learn spelling, and become better and better readers.

 

Today, we can read this because we experienced a similar version of that education ourselves. However, we have a new alphabetic lexicon facing us these days. It includes the following letter groupings that are no longer in song-order (and some include numbers) because, like the time we are currently living in, they are a bit out of order:

 

 

        RLP             Remote Learning Plan

 

        LMS             Learning Management System

 

        CDC            Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

 

        N95             (A mask) Not resistant to oil and filters out 95% of airborne particles

 

        WHO            World Health Organization

 

        COVID-19    Corona Virus Disease 2019

 

 

For the first several abbreviations in this list we merely name the letters in order like we are reciting the alphabet. When we get to the penultimate set of letters in the list, we can read it letter by letter or switch to reading it as an acronym--either way works. But when we get to last set of letters + numbers, we read it only like a word sans any kind of joy that might have come earlier in our reading lives when we discovered the word that was formed by a meaningful series of individual letters.

 

So as not to end on a somber note, let’s think about that red-letter day, hopefully not too distant in the future, when we can rejoin our Brimmer learning community on campus and re-engage with family, friends, and the greater community as we have in the past. We’ll have more letters to decipher for our students, grades PK-12--from Eating the Alphabet and My First Book of Letters to“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and The Scarlet Letter and many others.

 

The final letters to be offered here will be from a language, Polish, that tends to use an abundance of consonants and a sparsity of vowels (and form words that may be difficult to pronounce). These are mostly familiar letters that are strung together so unfamiliarly to us but that still convey meaning. The phrase here is related to a possibly familiar set of letters and numbers, NCC 1701. Note, while we have been made to be apart, we are still familiar in the best sense of the word, so I present these letters to all: Żyj długo i szczęśliwie.