Ray Bauer asked:
Quick question. What is your opinion on teaching the alphabet to elementary school students grades K-6? I am personally totally against it. I prefer to pound the CI. Other teachers in my district want to do units on the alphabet and I feel like our time could be spent better. What is your take on it?
Hi Ray –
I couldn’t agree with you more. But, for survival, I go over it once or twice in the fall, and, then, right in the middle of CI, at any moment, ask the kids how to spell some word that I just wrote on the board.
In that way, the kids get exposure to the sounds of the letters and I don’t have to fight a useless war against parents who think that the alphabet is necessary.
I guess it is necessary, if someone in the target country asks one of our students to recite it, or how to spell something. But, chances are, if they are a native speaker, they already know their own alphabet. There’s a lot more sarcasm where that came from.
So, by throwing a bone to the alphabet loving parents, we are able to avoid a little skirmish with them, which is a good thing because we are already fighting such a big, truly unpleasant war with them over the general idea of narrative/input based instruction anyway.
The amount of time lost spent teaching the alphabet is less than the time spent having to explain to parents why we don’t teach it, is my point.