ABSTRACT
Children and their families enjoy looking at alphabet books together. There is an abundance of these books of all sizes, shapes and designs freely available in bookshops and libraries and early years classrooms. Sometimes storybook characters introduce each letter and illustrators can show great inventiveness, sometimes creating visual jokes, sometimes including puzzles and most recently by creating interactive ‘pop-up’ books. As Nicholas Tucker reminds us, the best author-illustrators want to make encountering the letters of the alphabet an exuberant, fun-filled experience. Don’t be misled by bright covers that hide a dreary content and approach-or be seduced by the ‘workbook’ brigade that covers the shelves of so many children’s sections in bookshops! The latter are never to be found with books of real quality. From about 18 months to three years sheer delight in a shared experience is the most important thing. Direct teaching can cause anxiety and be counter productive if our aim is to awaken an interest in letters and words. But of course there is no denying that alphabetic knowledge is an important precursor of literacy and, once in school, children need help to understand the names, sounds and shapes of letters and their purposes. A good bridge between the pre-school and school stage is the interest children usually have in the spoken and written down forms of their own names. Seeing their name written down helps children begin to understand the relationship between what is said and what is written. Teachers can build on this and demonstrate sound-letter correspondence in shared reading and writing activities. Young children enjoy multi-sensory approaches which include drawing shapes in the air, in the sand tray and in dough, and singing and dancing to alphabet songs. Early years teachers also encourage children to organise some of their non-fiction writing alphabetically. These approaches go alongside continuing enjoyment of alphabet books, and some of the best for particular age groups are listed and discussed in this chapter. First, however, I want to put today’s alphabet books in their historical context, touching at the same time on the development of illustration in children’s books-a development relevant to alphabet, number and concept books and other non-fiction picturebooks.
