Teacher here. The best thing is a wooden puzzle with letters that you pull out and play with. They feel the shape of the letter from all sides and learn to see the shape and how they fit in the puzzle. Then once they know the names you say, “Show me the Bbbb letter,” and they learn the sounds. Focus on a few letters at a time and incorporate them into play. “Let’s give Teddy the P for him to ride with in your wagon!” Give them fingerpaint and encourage them to write the letter. Make sure they are writing the letter correctly. For a C, you start at the top and curve down to the left. Forming the letters correctly is really important.

Fingerprinting in pudding on a cookie tray is very fun!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^. It is not replacing school instruction or parenting. He is in K and does not have dyslexia but still needs reinforcement of reading. I also don’t want OT minutes going to teaching him how to use the iPad (as much as I’d like to avoid it, they do teach your monster to read in K as one of the reading centers)

Naive question- why does be need to be taught to use an iPad? I'm 40 and have never used one

They do their "iReady" testing on an ipad and also use the ipad for one of their reading stations.

Most apps aren't going to teach much, they're just babysitting. That said, Duo ABC isn't terrible.

I've heard very good things about Mentava, which is meant to be more or less the Engelmann "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" book as an app, but at that price I will do it myself from the book.

Anonymous wrote:^. It is not replacing school instruction or parenting. He is in K and does not have dyslexia but still needs reinforcement of reading. I also don’t want OT minutes going to teaching him how to use the iPad (as much as I’d like to avoid it, they do teach your monster to read in K as one of the reading centers)

Naive question- why does be need to be taught to use an iPad? I'm 40 and have never used one

Teach Your Monster to Read.

https://www.teachyourmonster.org/monster-news/the-science-of-reading-in-children

I highly recommend the Letter Factory 30 min movie/episode by Leapfrog! It is often on HBO but probably YouTube as well. It is super clever and completely taught my kids their letters and sounds.

PP here. Also, while it's great that you want to help your child work ahead, the Kindergarten will definitely be teaching this. So I'd say any progress you make now will give your daughter more confidence and help her succeed, but you don't have to worry about being "behind." She will almost certainly be ahead if you're starting now. I really think that 10-15 minutes of daily focused instruction that's tailored to the skills your daughter needs to work on specifically exceeds an entire day of general classroom instruction directed at the median student.

I haven't used any apps with my kids, and both my 2.5 year old and my 5 year old have memorized all the basic letter sounds, upper and lower case. The whole process took several months for each child, and could have been done more quickly but my focus was on absolute mastery since the letter sounds are so fundamental to reading.

We started with the Munchkin foam bath letters, introducing 2-3 the first day, and then adding one more each time he or she was getting the existing set consistently correct. Lower case I used refrigerator magnet letters since the Munchkin set is upper-case only. There are all kinds of games you can play. My toddler likes to "feed" the letters to his stuffed Elmo and make the sounds as Elmo "eats" the letters. He also likes to throw the letters as he makes the sounds. And we've tried games like laying all the letters out and him telling me which sounds he wants me to give him. With my daughter I had her flying a space ship to the different sounds, jumping from sound to sound, etc. Just be creative, and make it very tactile for them.

Apps are the worst - trust me. They seem like an easy way out but just cause more trouble. There is a workbook I used on Amazon - "Write to read" that teaches kids to read by writing. Start there.