The first learning expectation is: Begins to recognize letters. The first performance indicator is: Recognizes letters of her own name (first and then last) and letters that frequently occur in environmental print. The way a child develops letter recognition depends greatly on the underlying philosophy of the teacher. A great deal of the children I have taught over the years learned the letters in their name as they learned their letters in general. I have a purposeful and intentional approach to teaching the letters of the alphabet instead of an environmental exposure approach to the letters. For the children in my care, the letters in their name may or may not be the first letters they learn. Most of the children unless they have delays or immaturity issues start learning the letters when they are three or three and a half years of age. By the time they are four to four and a half years old, they know most or all of their upper case letters. Then we start on lower case. Remember I have a homeschooling background and know how to properly utilize flashcards in a one-on-one situation. Flashcards help this process immensely when you use them one-on-one. The trick is to vary how you make the child respond. Sometimes let them tell you the name as you hold up the card. The next time say the name and make them find the letter among a group of letters. Then the next time have them say the names as they put them in order. Expose them to one letter at a time and constantly grow the pool of letters you drill. This only takes a few minutes per day and produces results that honestly flabbergast the "flashcards are of the devil" crowd. A little direct teaching in this particular department can go a very long way.
The next performance indicator is: Recognizes letters in a specific context (mostly environmental print), but may not recognize them when the context changes. Again, this performance indicator depends heavily on how the children are taught their letters. If a teacher relies on environmental print exposure to teach the letters, this will be the result. If a teacher directly teaches the letters in the manner I laid out in the previous paragraph, this will not be the result. Children that have been taught their letters through direct instruction with varying types of exposure will know their letters in any context, period.
The next performance indicator for this learning expectation is: Is more likely to confuse uppercase letters within each of the following groups - DCGOQ, BRPSJU, EF, and NMWAVYHLITKXZ - but may make distinctions between letters that belong to different groups. There is a degree of truth to this performance indicator. It has been my experience that children will have difficulty with one or two of the letters in each group not the entire group. Of course, I direct teach the letters instead of trying to teach them through environmental exposure. Again, the teaching method makes all the difference in the world.
The last performance indicator for this learning expectation is: Knows part of the ABC sequence by rote, but does not use it to associate a letter symbol with a letter name. Again, this depends on the style of the teacher. If all you ever do is sing the Alphabet song, this will be the result. If you sing the Alphabet song as you point to the letters, you will get a different result because you have combined auditory learning with visual learning. This approach gives the children two different anchors for the knowledge, and that makes a huge difference in results. My normally developing four year olds know the ABC sequence by rote and can point out the individual letters on the ABC chart on my wall because the auditory teaches them the sequence and the visual reinforces the letter instruction I do with them otherwise.
The last learning expectation for the component Letter Recognition is: Begins to recognize frequently occurring uppercase and some of the most frequently occurring lowercase letters. The first performance indicator is: Can recognize some letters both in a familiar context (own name, environmental print) and in isolation. I am beginning to feel like a broken record but these standards assume that teachers will teach letter recognition by using the exposure to environmental print method. When letters are taught directly using the method I lay out in the previous section, the results will be far greater than this. Most children will learn all or most of their uppercase letters and quite a few if not all or most of their lower case letters depending on how much exposure to the direct teaching they received at three years old.
The last performance indicator for this learning expectation is: Recites ABCs; matches letter symbol with letter names by rote, but may have difficulty with letters that come later in the sequence (e.g., identifies KLMNOP as one letter); discriminates differences between upper and lower case letters. Again, direct instruction with flashcards pushes 4 to 5 year old children far beyond this performance indicator. A great deal of my children can match the lower case to the upper case not just discriminate the difference. Also, when I recite the alphabet, I point to the letters as we sing the song and deliberately slow down for the LMNOP section to help them understand that those are individual letters and not one letter. That has solved that problem almost entirely.
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