🖋️Early Literacy Part 2: Conversations with Cheryl
Four Trips Through the Alphabet:
Why We Don’t Teach Letters Just Once
When I first started teaching early literacy, I faithfully followed the Letter of the Week: introducing the letter of the week and filling the week with activities featuring that letter. I would work my way through the alphabet, first with consonants, and finally introducing short vowels.
I spent a great deal of time, energy, and money designing activities. “B week” involved pasting beans on outlines of b, baking banana bread, blowing bubbles on the playground, and playing games of bean bag toss.
It felt orderly and even creative (try finding multiple activities for Q!)
But was it the best way for young children to learn, and remember, the letters and their sounds? I quickly began to wonder.
When we wrote Jump Start to Literacy, we knew we wanted to avoid Letter of the Week. But the basic question remained: How should we organize the presentation of letters?
Should handwriting predominate? If so, the letters l and t would be the first two letters.
Should sound production matter? Then /b/ and /m/ would be early letters.
Or should the program organize letters by their utility, beginning with the most frequently used letters? In that case, we should begin with /s/ and /t/.
Research by Jones and D. Ray Reutzel encouraged us to think differently. Their study of Enhanced Alphabet Knowledge instruction found that children benefited from brief lessons and repeated encounters with letters through distributed cycles of review. Rather than spending a long time on one letter and leaving it behind, teachers introduced letters more efficiently and returned to them again and again. That idea became an important part of the design of our early literacy program.
We do not expect young children to master a letter-sound association after one introduction. Instead, children travel through the alphabet four times. Each cycle gives them another opportunity to hear, say, see, recognize, and form the letters. Each of the four journeys is organized around a different purpose.
Four cycles. Four different ways of encountering the alphabet.
Each trip builds on what children have already experienced.
Cycle One: Sounds Children Can Say
Our first cycle begins with the child, not with alphabetical order.
Consonants and short vowel sounds are introduced according to the developmental progression of speech-sound production. Some sounds are generally easier for young children to pronounce than others. By beginning with sounds that are more developmentally accessible, we allow children to experience early success as they listen to a sound, say it, and connect it to an action.
This first trip through the alphabet says, in effect:
Cycle Two: How Letters Are Formed
During the second cycle, children revisit the sounds, associate them with letters, and learn letter formation.
Children are not merely memorizing the name of a visual symbol. They are learning that the sounds they already hear and produce in spoken language can be represented in print. This time, letters are organized according to the movements required to produce them. Letters that begin with similar strokes or use related movement patterns can be taught near one another. Children use large movements before moving to smaller, more precise handwriting. They might form a letter in the air and trace a tactile letter while saying its sound. The hand, eye, ear, and voice work together.
This cycle communicates:
Cycle Three: The Sounds We Meet Most Often
On the third journey, letters and sounds are organized according to frequency. Children receive additional experience with the sounds and letters they are especially likely to encounter in spoken language and print.
This cycle helps children notice that letters are not isolated symbols appearing only on alphabet cards. They are everywhere - in names, familiar words, classroom print, nursery rhymes, shared books, and the language children use every day. Because children have already encountered these letter-sound associations in two earlier cycles, they are ready to recognize them more quickly and apply them more flexibly. They may listen for a target sound in a rhyme, find its letter in print, or identify words that begin or end with it.
The message of this cycle is:
Cycle Four: Putting the Alphabet in Order
In the fourth cycle, children revisit the letters in alphabetical order.
Alphabetical order matters. Children need to understand that the alphabet is a stable system with a conventional sequence. That knowledge helps them use alphabet books, classroom displays, dictionaries, indexes, and other reference tools later.
But alphabetical order does not have to determine the order in which letter sounds are first taught. By the time children reach this cycle, the alphabet is not simply a song containing a long string of unfamiliar letter names. Its sequence is filled with sounds, shapes, movements, and meaningful experiences they have already encountered.
This final cycle says:
Repetition Without Simply Repeating
At first glance, four trips through the alphabet might sound repetitive. They are, but they are not redundant.
Each cycle asks children to think about the letters through a different lens:
Cycle One connects actions to the developmental production of speech sounds.
Cycle Two connects letters to movement and formation.
Cycle Three connects letters and sounds to their frequency and use in language and print.
Cycle Four organizes the letters within the conventional alphabetic sequence.
With each cycle, children return to previously introduced knowledge while adding something new. A child may first learn to say a sound, later form its letter, then notice it repeatedly in a nursery rhyme, and finally locate it within the alphabet.
That is the power of cyclical instruction: children do not merely repeat an experience. They deepen it.
Young children also differ greatly in what they already know. One child may recognize the first letter in her name but know few letter sounds. Another may sing the alphabet accurately without being able to identify individual letters. A third may recognize many uppercase letters but need support connecting them to sounds or forming their lowercase counterparts.
Multiple, distributed encounters give each child more than one opportunity to learn. A child who does not secure a letter-sound association during the first cycle encounters it again within a new and meaningful context. A child who already knows it can strengthen recognition, formation, application, and automaticity. The teacher can observe which associations are becoming secure and which require more modeling and practice.
The Research-Informed Idea Behind the Design
Jones and Reutzel did not study our particular four-cycle sequence. Our cycles are our program’s application of the broader research-supported principles they examined: increase children’s exposure to letters, use brief instruction, revisit learning through distributed cycles, and give additional attention to letters that are more difficult to learn.
Their work challenged the assumption that alphabet instruction must mean spending an equal amount of time on every letter, one letter at a time. It helped affirm a more responsive idea: introduce letters purposefully, return to them frequently, and deepen children’s knowledge with every encounter.
That is why our early literacy program does not treat the alphabet as a checklist to complete once.
We treat it as a body of knowledge children gradually build: one sound, one movement, one meaningful encounter, and one carefully planned cycle at a time.
Reference
Jones, C. D., & Reutzel, D. R. (2012). Enhanced alphabet knowledge instruction: Exploring a change of frequency, focus, and distributed cycles of review. Reading Psychology, 33(5), 448–464.
In Focus explores the concepts that matter most in structured literacy. Each topic examines the research, shares classroom experience, offers practical teaching strategies, and brings it all together the CRSL Way.
