Have you tried our newest Alphabet Formation song videos? They teach the steps for writing both the capital and lowercase letter, and all of them have beginning sound pictures, too! This collection of videos is an AMAZING teaching tool! You can find it in the Alphabet section of our Uscreen internet video site titled “Alphabet Formation: Songs to Write the ABCs.”
What’s the Difference?
This collection is different from our previous alphabet video set, “Alphabet- Letters and Sounds,” which teaches kids to recognize the letters, and to learn their sounds. This newer set of videos teaches children how to write the letters correctly on lined paper, and reminds children of the letter sounds.
How Do We Teach Kids to Use Lined Paper?
Throughout the videos, we call the lines “Sky, fence, grass, dirt/mud,” as shown below. You may remember this method from my blog post Tips for Teaching Kids to Write on Lined Paper, and also on my post, From Pre-Writing Strokes to Letters on Sky, Grass, Dirt Paper! These posts have some free downloads to help with this, but to introduce it, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the Living Letters program from Educlime.com, and especially their book, Living Letters: A Story About Where Letters Live on the Line. This is how I always introduce the concept of writing letters on the line with this book! I lay the foundation with the book, and then the music videos reinforce it. And of course, we ALWAYS incorporate full body motions in the videos! Finally, we practice on colored paper for the WIN!
Video Organization
There are two sections in the Alphabet Formation tab. The top section has the music videos, and the bottom section shows how to draw each letter using spoken lyrics from the song. (See photo directly below.) Each song averages about one and a half minutes long, with the shortest song (Letter E) being 1:01 minutes and the longest 2:00 minutes (Letter X). Teachers can have the kids sing and move along with the top videos, and then play the bottom section while kids practice writing the letters on paper or dry erase boards, etc. That’s my favorite way!
Animation and Movements
I love the way the lines are drawn in the air, just as if the actors were actually making those lines themselves! That was harder to make happen than it looks, so kudos to the my husband who made that magic. 🙂
Letter Sounds and Picture Cues
The songs include lots of beginning sound picture cues to keep pushing those all important sound associations at the kids. And the graphics are SOOO cute! Most of them were drawn by our wonderful illustrator, Korey Scott, who has done the illustrations for our 1-100 Picture Book, our Counting Creatures, and many of our other products! He’s a favorite!
Inclusive Cast
As usual, we have done our best to find an inclusive cast, in hopes that every child will see someone up there that resembles him or herself. My kids ALWAYS want to know the names of each actor. What about yours? LOL!
I used these songs with my TKs (Transitional Kindergartners) as my husband finished each one. They are fun, active, short, and they get the job done! We focused on one letter each week, and sang that letter song daily and they do help! However, I discovered that my little ones really NEEDED to draw along with those words with a marker or pencil to understand what the songs are for. (TK is the first year in a two year kindergarten program, and now includes all four year old kids in California.)
I hope you will check out these new videos and let me know what you think! 🙂
