Alphabetizing is a skill that your children will use daily as adults, so it’s important to make sure they have a lot of practice with ABC order when they’re young. While there are innumerable worksheets available online to help children practice alphabetizing, hands-on, kinesthetic activities often produce a much higher level of retention of skills than worksheets are able to do.

Learning ABC order is usually simple for most kids, but learning it well is much more difficult. So here are some easy, hands-on activities that can help your children strengthen and improve their alphabetizing skills. These activities don’t cover alphabetizing by the second of third letter (and so on), but they can and do greatly improve the all-important underlying skill of quick-recall of basic ABC order.

Here are a few tips before you get started:

First of all, pick up a set of letter tiles, or make a set of your own. The set would need to include all the letters of the alphabet. Whether the tiles are capital letters, lower-case, or a mixture of both is entirely up to you. I purchased this jar of tiles for around $4 at Wal-Mart, and there are multiples of each letter in the jar, so I never run out when my kids do an extended alphabetizing competition. When you do these alphabetizing activities, it is important that you as the teacher watch your children for accuracy and provide guidance when necessary. If you have more than one child, you might also like to make it a “competition” if you feel it would be appropriate. Kitchen timers are a wonderful resource for homeschooling. Use a timer to count up or down during each activity. Count down to see how many of the activities your child can do in a set amount of time, or count up to see how long each activity takes. Either way, your child my enjoy trying to beat his best time or number of attempts.

Alphabetizing Activities

BEGINNING ABC ORDER

For the young student that is not yet confident with ABC order, separate a single alphabet set (all 26 letters), and have your child put the letters in ABC order from A to Z. Once they’ve mastered that, chose only about 5 consecutive letters from anywhere in the alphabet and have them put those letters in ABC order. Once they master that, have them move on to the following activities.

TWO LETTER SORT

Select two tiles at a time and have your child move the tiles into ABC order. Once one set is completed correctly, give him two more tiles. Continue in this manner for as long as desired. You might like to use a timer so your child can see how many pairs he can do in 1 minute.

FIND THE LETTER

Another basic beginning activity is to place several tiles face down in front of your child, and then have him turn over two at a time. He would then point to the letter that comes first. You can change up this activity by having him turn over more than two tiles at a time or by having him point to the tile that comes last.

MULTIPLE LETTER SORT

Give your child more than two tiles at a time; choose a set number of tiles or simply give him a handful. Then have him put all the tiles in ABC order. Once the tiles are in the correct order your child can push them aside and you can give him another set of tiles to alphabetize. You can continue in this manner, set a timer that counts down to see how many sets he can do in 1 or 2 minutes, or use the timer to see how long it takes him to complete one set. If your child is competitive, he might enjoy trying to beat his own time.

SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE

Choose any letter from the stack of tiles and set it directly in front of the child; this is the dividing tile. Then give your child a stack of tiles and have him separate the tiles based on whether they come before or after the initial tile that was chosen. I like doing this with the letter Q as the dividing tile at first, and then moving on to choosing random letters after my children gain confidence. Again, you can use a timer for motivation or turn it into a competition either with himself or with a sibling.

VISUAL/AUDITORY ACTIVITY

Many kids, when they are trying to recall ABC order (such as when they’re looking up words in the dictionary), sing the alphabet song to themselves starting from the beginning each time. I like to teach my kids the alphabet in groups, based on the rhythm of the ABC song so that they are more comfortable with beginning at several different places in the song. Here’s a chart that you can use to help reinforce the visual and auditory aspects of ABC order. You can use this chart to help even very young children learn and practice alphabetical order.

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