My son’s kindergarten class has been learning the 1st 5 letters of the alphabet, in both upper and lower case. Which I thought he already knew, but apparently he is getting his lower case b and d mixed up. (Why did the preschool teacher NEVER correct him when he got letters backwards???) Fine, I think…isn’t this common in dyslexic children? Not that I think he’s dyslexic, but surely somewhere out there I can learn some tricks to help him remember which letter is which. Only I couldn’t find *anything* on the internet! I tried googling all sorts of things but nothing came up that would help him.
So I turned on the mom brain and started thinking about things we could do to practice. I thought about printing out letter pages and letting him color them, but I decided that wouldn’t really address the root of the problem. And then I had a stroke of genius…I would print out a whole bunch of pictures of objects that began with the letter b or d. He’s got the phonetics figured out, so it was easy for him to determine whether it was a b or d word. Then he had to glue either a printed b or d to the picture. Once we ran out of the printed letters (I did a LOT of pictures!) I made him write the correct letter. This little game was a huge hit, and he got them ALL right!
Since I had a hard time finding a good method to help him differentiate these letters, I thought I’d share the pages I made. Basically, I just cut the letters up, then cut each image so it was on it’s own “card.” Then I ran through the pictures with him to make sure he understood what they were all supposed to be, because I had to get a little creative! They are ball, dog, books, drum, duck, bus, dinosaur, dollar, baby, bird, bananas, balloons, bed, desk, dancing, butterfly, bee (or bug), dolphin, dragon, doll, boots, bear, doctor, dad, bells, and door. After that it was his job to choose either a b or d (they were all mixed up in a pile, so he had to figure out which was which for himself) and glue it to the picture card, or write the correct letter if there were none left to glue. I did the first 10 with him, and he did the rest on his own. I’m attaching the .pdf file to this post (I hope!) so feel free to use it if you think it might be helpful for you. It’s certainly not the most professional thing out there, but it worked for us!
