How To Teach The Alphabet Using Bible Games
Want to learn how to teach the alphabet using Bible games? Well for us, playing bible games is a fun and easy way to increase your bible knowledge while fostering strong relationships. Did you know that bible games is also a useful method for teaching the alphabet? It is one of the fun ways to teach the alphabet. In this post we will share bible games and activities you can use to help teach the alphabet to your kids.
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How To Teach The Alphabet
The alphabet serves as the foundation on which writing and reading is built. Some early learning things kids need to know about the alphabet include identifying uppercase and lowercase letters, identifying the sound of letters and writing alphabet letters.
Many children start recognizing letters at about age 2 or 3. As they learn upper and lowercase letters of the alphabet they later progress to put letters together to make words then words to make sentences then sentences into stories. Letter recognition plays an important role in teaching the alphabet. Letter recognition involves both recognizing the letter of the alphabet and being able to write the letter of the alphabet.
The Order For Teaching The Alphabet
Wondering what order to teach the alphabet in? We think lowercase is better because we see those letters more. When reading a book there certainly are more lowercased letters than upper cased ones so it will be easier for kids to be able to see and learn these letters. Lower case letters also seem more easier to write as there are fewer turns to make in our opinion.
Occupational therapists however suggest that teaching capital letters first is a way to slow down writing. They advocate for this as working on the capital letters help kids who aren’t ready to write catch up and learn how to control their pencil before writing lowercase letters.
The choice is however yours. Which will you choose to do first? Or will you do both first? According to Laura Sowdon, if your child already knows both upper and lowercase letters by sight and can draw shapes such as triangles well they may be ready to write both upper and lowercase. So, assess your kid and then decide which way to go.
How to Teach the Alphabet Using Bible Activities
Use Magnetic Letters
A useful way to teach the alphabet is having your child recognize and write letters in his or her name. One can also use bible names to teach the alphabet and the letter recognition skill. One can purchase magnetic letters and have the child see if they can find the letters and place them on the fridge to spell names in a specified time.
A-Z Bible Workbooks
Tracing letters is another great way to teach the alphabet and specifically letter recognition. You can trace letters using resources like this. You can make this into a game by giving the child points for each letter tracing they complete and then they get a prize after completing a certain number correctly. You can also have your kids trace bible verses. This A-Z Bible Letter Recognition Workbook is a great resource to start with.
Play I-Spy With Bible Picture Books
Another important skill in teaching the alphabet is phonics. Kids need to know how letters sound. A game which can help in this is the game I spy. “I spy with my little eye something that starts with the letter that makes the sound a” for example then the child has to find things that have that sound in the room. A bible game alternative is to have a bible book with pictures and then the child finds something in the picture that makes that sound.
Play With Bible Flash Cards
We use flash cards for teaching kids various things so how about bible based flashed cards? Why not use flash cards that use words from the bible to represent the letters of the alphabet? Kids ages 2, 3, or even 4 years old can change the way they learn and interact by using re-closable plastic rings to keep flashcards together while sorting and individually learning the cards. This is a great way to teach the alphabet while keeping the kids focused on the word of God.
Play Bible Games – Team PW
A game that incorporates many of these elements that we want to tell you about is a game we call Team PW; short for Team Play to Win. This game was created from a childhood game we used to play. We don’t know the creator of that childhood game so we can’t provide much detail about it however we have modified it and created our bible version called Team PW. In this bible game, the players find something from the bible that is a T-thing, E-event, A-animal, M-man’s name, P-place or W-woman’s name.
Here are the instructions:
- Roll a dice to determine which team gets to pick the letter first. The team with the highest roll goes first.
- The team with the highest roll will pick a letter of the alphabet from the Team PW Game chart. Once a letter is picked put an X through it on the chart.
- All adults on the team will then find either a thing, event, animal, man’s name, place or a woman’s name that begins with letter that was picked and write it under the respective heading on the game sheet. The preschool children on the team will have to find the letter that was chosen from the pile of printable letters while the school aged children will be responsible for tracing the letter chosen. You can download the game sheet here. There will be a time set either a 2 minute on the clock or use an hourglass.
- The first team to complete the tasks for the letter chosen gets the full points for that round. The other teams get points only for those activities they completed. The winning team gets to pick either a letter from the chart or one of the instructions to give to 1 opposing team. For example they could give the team “lose 1 turn” so that team would not play for the next round. When a team chooses this option however the next letter will be chosen by the opposing team who was given the instructions.
- This is an “open book” game so teams are allowed to use whatever resources they need such as the internet or their bible.
- One point is given for each task that is correctly completed. The team that completes all categories and has the highest number of points is the winner.
You can download the TEAM PW Game chart here. Let us know how you enjoyed this game.
