Turn Your Child into a Letter Detective!

What You Need:

• Highlighters in several colors
• Magazines or newspapers
• Several index cards or post-it notes
• Magnifying glass (optional)

What You Do:

1. Choose a letter of the alphabet. Make sure that your child knows what it looks like, both as a capital letter and as a lowercase letter. (You may want to print both versions on an index card or post-it note, to give them a reference.) Once you've given your child a target, arm them with a set of old magazines or newspapers to hunt through, and a magnifying glass if you've got one, to add to the Sherlock Holmes experience. As they find their letter, they should highlight it.
2. Want to add extra excitement? Use a timer and see how many versions of the letter your child can find in two or three minutes. Tally the number and see if they can "beat" it the next time.
3. If your child is having difficulty with this, don't despair. The magazine and newspaper pages may have too much writing on them. You can create your own page using a computer's word processing program. Instead of those Word Searches, so common in the newspaper, you're creating a Letter Search. Be sure to use a large font size, then type letters randomly, using some uppercase and some lowercase letters. To keep frustration levels low, use your focus letter frequently, at least at first. Here's an example of what a letter search for "Aa" would look like.
4. Once your child is finding all of the letters of the alphabet quickly, challenge them with some high frequency words, instead. Some possible words to start with include: “the,” “a,” “to,” “my,” “is,” “you,” and “and.”

The more they practice, the faster they'll get. So keep those highlighters handy, and the hunt fresh.