I have a Kindergarten student that does not know thier letters.  They have been exposed to the letters in pre-school, Kindergarten, and in interventions but they are retaining very little.  What resouces or ideas do you have to help a struggling learner learn their letters? -Mike in Southern Utah

A typical child can learn a concept or in this case a letter with reletivily few exposures to that bit of content.  For some of our children with significant learning challenges this may take hundreds of exposures to a bit of content before it sticks.  The key to success it to find as many ways to teach the letters as possible and to spread those teaching moments across a variety of activities times through out the day.  For example after teaching a specific letter, have the students search for that letter when going down the hall, make the letter with play-dough, when doing math have the student place counters on a large letter and count the noumbers of counters needed.

In addition to the suggestions above there are a some great resources and tools to help you teach the alphabet.

  • Word Wagon & Fish school by Duck Duck Moose availible on ios, android, and Kinndle Fire.  These apps are fun and simple and provide a lot of practice in a way that keeps students engaged.  It uses scafolding to initially have students just matching letters based on letter names, then to letter sounds, and then indipendanly spelling.  Word Wagon
  • Wet-Dry-Try is a multisensory activity that appeals to different learning styles. It gives just the right amount of handwriting practice in a game-based format that feels like fun, and not like practice. Wet-Dry-Try