Practical and fun ways to learn the alphabet?

I taught my children the alphabet using the American Sign Language hand symbols for each letter. That way they leaned two alphabets at once and it was less boring that straight verbal repetition.

@lynfromnm Loves it!

Are you working with a group of kids? I had friend who was teaching kids, teaching the alphabet and teaching them their first words and she made smocks or something, not full smocks, but something they could wear over themselves that had the letters of the alphabet and each of the kids got to be a letter and got to spell out the words. If the group isn’t that big you can have them take turns. They’re not going to learn the alphabet all at once so you don’t really need 26 of them. Maybe you could to something like that. Have something fun for them to wear that has a letter on it and let them spell out the words.

I think songs coupled with flashcards. Visual and audial combined can be the best way to teach the alphabet.

Sesame Street reruns?

Truly fun read the illustrated Edward Gorey alphabet book AMPHIGOREY
Google Images pages here
“A is for Alice who fell down the stairs”
“B is for Basil, assaulted by bears”
Gorey books are macabre works of pseudo-Victorian art, funny and beautifully drawn.
You will learn your ABCs

The full AMPHIGOREY alphabet here in a slide/flash presentation. A little fast.
Buy the book. It is delightful.

My youngest daughter learned the alphabet from watching Wheel of Fortune with me, I kid you not. I was already teaching her with blocks and cards, but we were only up to “C” when I realized she knew the whole damn thing.

You might want to check out Here Come the ABCs, an album (and DVD) by They Might be Giants. Their songs are silly and fun, and most of the time they’re not annoying for grown-ups to listen to :)

Invent something totally funny that is so weird that the human brain has no choice but to remember it. I just made this up:

A baby can dream easily, forgetting ghosts haunting idle jungle kangaroos, loving mothers nursing other pampered quarrelsome rascals, sucking tits under very weird xeroxed yearbook zebras.

You had me at tits.

@mattbrowne I am literally grinning from ear to ear from that one. That kind of thing is just crying out to you to think about writing a whimsical but slightly demented children’s alphabet book, maybe even with teacher’s packages and lesson plans based on the book. Then @seazen can use it to teach his kids Though I suspect that your whimsical, slightly demented alphabet book would probably be banned from many public schools here in the “land of the free”. :-)

@lillycoyote – Yeah, I know, the land of the free doesn’t like tits ;-) But human brains love weird stuff.