Letters recognition activities
10 Letter Recognition Activities - Days With Grey
The curiosity about how to teach letters to your child is such a hot topic! Learning the alphabet unlocks so many new doors, and letter recognition is the foundation of early literacy.
“How do I teach my child the alphabet,” is one of the most commonly asked questions. What we have learned in more recent studies is that helping our children hear letter sounds and watch our mouths when we form letters is more important than memorizing. Learn why hands-on learning is important for child development and easy ways you can set up ways to practice.
Here are 10 letter recognition activities for toddlers and preschoolers. Recognizing a letter can happen in four forms; uppercase print, lowercase print, uppercase cursive, and lowercase cursive. To better understand reading development, read our article, A Parent’s Guide to Phonemic Awareness.
This article will look closely at alphabet recognition and how you can help your child learn the letters. – All through hands-on play, of course!
RELATED: Here are five ways to incorporate reading readiness into your daily routine with toddlers, preschoolers, and big kids.
What Is Letter Recognition?
Letter recognition is the ability to identify letter names, recognize what a letter looks like, recognize how a letter sounds, and how notes come together to make blended sounds.
The alphabet does not need to be taught in a specific order; however, many believe teaching should begin with the most common letters. For example, T, L, and M will be taught before X and Q.
I like to begin with the letters in my child’s name.
Activities on Demand
Want great ideas without the ads? Download these 20 hands-on learning games for kids.
Why is Letter Recognition Important?
By Kindergarten, children learning under the Common Core will be asked to recognize and remember lowercase letters of the alphabet.
Let’s remember that we have plenty of time to build solid foundations of what letters look like, what they are called, and what sound they make.
In preschool, we want to respect this time and introduce letters with lots of room for learning through play and exploration. Exploring the letter names, what a letter looks like, letter sounds, and letter relationships take time to develop!
RELATED: 101 preschool activities to use throughout the year!
Typical Stages of Letter Recognition:
- Letter Names: Understands letters have names.
- Identify 10 Letters: Can identify ten letters, including their name. This is when they also begin to recognize their name in print.
- Case Differences: Begins to identify lowercase and uppercase letters.
- Letter Sounds: Develops a more in-depth understanding that letters stand for sounds.
- Mastery: Masters all letter sounds and can identify letter names.
RELATED: Alphabet toys are a great addition to toys toddlers and preschoolers use daily!
How to Teach Letter Recognition:
- Start with the letters in your child’s name: These letters will have meaning, and your child will be invested in wanting to remember them. Begin with these 15+ Name Activities.
- Show how the letter is formed: Is it a straight line? Curve? Do you recognize a point in your letter?
- Read ABC books: Here is an excellent list of ABC books from Happily Ever Elephants.
- Use a poster: Write your child’s name on a poster and hang it in their room. Decorate posters with the letters of the alphabet. Hang them at eye level.
- Magnetic letter play: Play with magnetic letters so they can be creative and get comfortable with letter recognition.
- Songs: Sing songs about the alphabet.
- Sound and picture: Match letter sounds with pictures.
- Play games: Letter cards are great for recognition learning (and fun!)
- Make ABC books: Have your child stamp, and you write the words.
- Relate letters to people they know and love: Share and begin to recognize the names of family and friends.
- Sound it out: Talk about how the letter sounds. H, hat, /h/.
- Write it out: After much practice with fine motor skills, begin to write the letters.
10 Activities to Introduce, Improve, and Practice Letter Recognition.
Now more than ever, parents are stressed about doing too much. According to this survey that shares the impacts of the pandemic on young children and their parents, the frequency of parents reading to children and indoor play has dropped.
Parents are more likely to rely on screens because it is a way to decompress after a long work day. (No judgment, it is impossible to do all the things.
I feel it too.)
This letter recognition post is intended to share low-prep activities to bring back hands-on learning through play that will feel as easy to set up as relying on digital devices.
RELATED: If you have a toddler just starting, begin with these quick and easy letter recognition activities that use two letters simultaneously.
Rock Letters Alphabet Activity
This easy alphabet idea comes from our activity cards set one. Gather some black rocks from the dollar store and write a few letters on each one with a white permanent marker. Have your toddler or preschooler practice with the first letter of family members’ names. Next, try playing with all the letters in your child’s name.
Alphabet Sort; Straights and Curves
Did you know that letters have curves, straights, slants, tunnels, and dots? I didn’t either until it was pointed out to me. Seeing and recognizing this is the first step to writing the letters. Let’s pay attention to how a letter looks before putting the pencil in their hand and asking a child to write their name.
Letter Poke and Find
Grab your muffin tin! This alphabet surprise game is a hoot. Put letters in the muffin tin and cover with tissue paper. Your child plays by poking through the tissue paper and recalling the letter name pulled. This is a great risk-free way to ask your child which letters they recognize without the stress of flashcards.
ABC Bean Sensory Bin
Beans are a hit for sensory play. Bury a few plastic lacing letters and invite your child to dig in. Grasping these small letters will help with fine motor development and stimulate the senses for more learning!
RELATED: Does your child enjoy sensory play? Check out these 40 sensory bins for kids.
Letter Recognition Drive and Park
Curious about which letters your child knows but also wants to tread lightly? Good call! I also don’t enjoy being interrogated. Your child drives each car to the correct parking spot as you call out letters for this letter recognition activity.
If your child is new to learning letters, use less. We can add on more letters as your child develops.
Find your Name
Cheers to a classic name activity. (you can also find it in this 15+ name activities for kids post). Write the names of family members throughout the paper. Next, invite your child to find their name on the giant poster and circle it. This is an excellent way to prep for writing and hold a steady hand as your child circles each name.
Splash the Alphabet
When the weather warms up, head outside to splash the alphabet. For this idea, I like to take a back seat with a large seltzer and show my child a letter card. We talk about the letter name and the letter sound; then, he is off to splash it with colored water. This is a BIG win – especially for reluctant learners.
Write with Magnets
We made this magnetic board years ago, but never underestimate a cookie sheet! Make a large letter using tape and have your toddler or preschooler follow the lines with transportation magnets or race cars.
This letter activity is a fun prewriting activity to practice the lines and curves of letters.
RELATED: Ready to write? Here are the stages of writing development.
Fine Motor Letter Grab
Let’s put those lacing letters to good use with another activity. Here, your child will fish the letters out from the pond and color-sort them when finished. As I sip my hot tea, my preschooler and I chat about the letters he grabbed. Skills practiced are fine motor development, hand-eye coordination, letter recognition, and color sorting. Phew! Can you believe all that in ONE idea? Five stars.
Alphabet Bingo – with a twist!
Remember bingo? Here is how your child can play solo. Grab some letters and place them in a tissue box. Write the letters you picked on the paper. Invite your child to dig in the box and try and get five in a row to win. This makes a fantastic morning activity we like to call Breakfast Invitations.
Kindergarten Word Families
As your child begins to put sounds together, head to this Kindergarten word family post for a list of consonant, vowel, and consonant words.
We call these words CVC words or word families. Invite your child to think of words in the -at family by changing the beginning sound. If it is a word, try using it in a sentence. Toss the letter into the nonsense word dish if it makes a nonsense word.
Another great activity for Kindergartners to explore beginning sounds is this picture and sound match-up we played with my five-year-old.
More Letter Activities
- Alphabet Ice Sensory Play
- Giant Alphabet Dot to Dot
- Writing Letters with Race Cars
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you teach the alphabet?
Start with the letters in your child’s name. These letters are familiar to children, which makes them more invested. Children who feel connected to learning are more likely to take risks. Use these 15-name activities to get started.
What if a child struggles with memorizing letter names?
We can take a step back when a child struggles to memorize letter names.
Begin talking about the letters you notice in your environment and invite your child to play with the letters in their name. Take learning letters slow to honor your child’s pace. Meet your child at the stage they are by identifying a few letters at a time. Add more letters as your child develops.
My child is ready to read. What next?
When children show reading readiness, we want to model what our mouth looks like when saying the letter sound. Begin talking about how our voice box vibrates (or doesn’t) when making the letter sounds. Bringing attention to these details will help your child decode words as reading becomes more complex over the years.
Days with Grey is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Read more about these links in my disclosure policy.
14 Letter Recognition Activities for Preschoolers
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Helping preschoolers to gain letter recognition skills does not need to feel like “work.
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The best way to teach letter recognition is through play, in a fun, stress-free, and positive manner.
Here’s a brief intro to letter recognition, followed by 14 letter identifying activities.
What Letter Recognition Means
Learning letter recognition skills involves several different hands-on components.
Children need to distinguish the shapes of letters from each other (visually recognize them) and be able to point to and state the letter names, as well as the sounds made by each letter.
In addition, they must learn to form letters and write them.
These skills do not all need to be accomplished during the preschool years and in fact, preschoolers are not yet developmentally ready to learn to read and write.
By simply exposing children in a fun way, you will begin the process of laying down foundational pre-reading and writing skills.
When Should a Child Recognize Letters of the Alphabet?
Although you can read about average ages when kids gain alphabet skills, those often vary widely.
Just as children learn to walk and talk at different ages, the same is true for recognizing letters of the alphabet.
They each learn at their own pace, depending on many factors.
How to Build Skills to Prepare Children for Letter Recognition
Through fun play activities, parents can help their children gain various developmental skills that prepare preschoolers for letter identification.
Those types of skills include visual perception, memory and auditory perception.
What this means is that learning the letters does not in fact start with exposure to the actual letters, but rather to play activities that develop these skills.
Visual Perception
Visual perception refers to a child’s brain making sense of what their eyes are seeing, such as details and shapes (shape recognition).
These skills also include visual-motor and eye-hand coordination.
Helpful kinds of activities include:
- Those that exercise the large muscles (such as throwing/catching).
- Small motor activities (like lacing).
- Visual perception (such as building puzzles).
- Limiting screen time, which has limitations related to visual perception skills.
Memory
Memory development relates to storing and using information in the brain.
Stress-free activities to enhance these skills include:
- Simple card games
- Memory card games (get your own by downloading the FREE set of printables at the end of the post)
- Talking about fun memories
- Story visualization
- Reading and talking about books
- Visual memory games, like picture bingo
- Auditory memory games
Auditory Perception
Auditory perception includes the brain’s ability to distinguish sounds and words, which is important for learning the sounds of letters.
These are the kind of activities that can support this skill:
- Listening to music
- Distinguishing animal sounds
- Clapping out copied rhythm patterns
[source]
How to Teach Letter Recognition to Children
Even before children show an interest in print, these kinds of activities are meaningful and fun and will set the stage for letter recognition:
- Reading to them
- Sharing poems and nursery rhymes
- Talking to them
- Telling stories
- Singing songs to or with them
Keep it fresh, keep it new, and be willing to return to their favourite activities when asked.
As your children show a growing interest in print, make it available to them whenever possible.
Instead of keeping that book to yourself as you read to them, show children the words, running your fingers over them as you read. Let kids turn the pages of books.
Have books available in the home to which kids have constant access.
So many things around the house contain words, like packages, lists, letters, emails, screens, magazines, and greeting cards.
Point and touch as you read, showing children that you are using words daily, expressing how much can be learned through their use.
Write in front of your kids for all different purposes, at least sometimes spelling aloud.
Make drawing and writing tools and surfaces available to children at all times, indoors and out.
Don’t just offer the traditional papers and crayons – include:
- Drawing with sticks in the sand
- Writing on clay or playdough
- Drawing on shower and bath walls with soap
Should I Teach the Letters in a Specific Order?
Instead of teaching letters in any special, prescribed order, focus on those that are used most often and in order of importance for your children.
They typically want to know about the letters:
- In their names.
- In “MOM” and “DAD”.
- In a pet’s name.
- In environmental print (like on STOP or WALK signs).
- In outstanding words from a favourite storybook.
Think about and pay attention to those letters and words that appear to be interesting to your kids, using them as the foundation to build upon.
Then, when children are ready to formally learn the letters, teach them using sets of letters that make the most combinations of words, as explained in this article on teaching letters.
Is it Better to Teach Upper or Lowercase Letters First?
For preschoolers, the field of occupational therapy makes a good case for beginning with capitals in handwriting letter formation.
They are formed from larger lines and curves that avoid retracing and changing directions, while still teaching top to bottom strokes.
If children try to form letters for which their visual-motor skills are not prepared, they sometimes build poor habits that can be difficult to break later on.
Of course, your children may be familiar with lowercase letters, seeing them in many print formats, and gradually learning to identify them.
When their motor skills are ready, they typically make an easy switch to including them along with uppercase when they write.
[source]
Letter Recognition Activities and Games for Preschoolers
Here are some fun ways to teach letter recognition through play.
1. Point Out Environmental Print
Print is all around us.
Point out, talk about and stress the sounds of words on signs (such as favourite restaurants and traffic/street signs), cereal or other product boxes/labels, and familiar logos.
2. Share Rhyming Books
Read favourite rhyming books to your children, accentuating the rhyme and rhythm.
Afterwards, play an oral game of stating some rhyming words from the story and adding a new rhyming word of your own.
Challenge your kids to come up with more words that rhyme.
Either real or pretend “words” are okay, as it is the rhyming factor that counts.
3. Letter Hunt
Point out and talk about the letters in your child’s name, making them clearly visible in print.
Show them how you find one of those same letters in a magazine or newspaper and cut it out as a rather square piece (not necessarily trying to cut out close to the letter’s edges).
Challenge them to find other letters from their name in print and cut those out, as well.
After all the letters have been found, they can arrange them in the correct order for their name.
These may be kept in a small bag for future use or glued onto a coloured sheet of paper to post on the fridge or in your child’s room.
Instead of cutting, another option is to use different colours of highlighters to mark various letters found in print.
4. Play with Plastic/Wooden Letters
Letters may be sorted and put into piles in different ways:
- Those with curves
- Letters with straight lines
- Those from a child’s name or other important words
- Letters they can name
- Those for which they can say the sounds
Letters with magnets may be used on the fridge or on a magnet board for sorting purposes.
5. Bake Letters
Use bread or pretzel dough to form letters with your children, then bake them to be eaten later.
While you work, talk about the letter names, sounds, and easy words (like their names) that may be formed.
Special baking tins and cookie cutters may be purchased to bake letters. You can also bake oblong cakes and cut them into large letter shapes, as well.
6. Form Letters with Familiar Materials
Offer kids various types and colours of pasta to form letters on flat backgrounds, either to glue into place or to leave loose and rearrange into different letters.
Other materials to explore might include:
- Dry breakfast cereals
- Buttons or pennies
- Cotton balls
- Dried beans
- Mini-marshmallows
- Toothpicks
- Rice
- Yarn
7. Form Letters with Unusual Materials
Using a tabletop or oblong baking pan with low sides, spread shaving cream or pudding for children to trace letters into with their fingers.
The same may be done with sand (or moved outside), to trace in with fingers or safe “sticks,” like pencils, dowels, or rulers.
8. Go on a Scavenger Hunt
Have children choose a letter card or cutout. Talk about how the letter looks and sounds.
Depending on children’s level of development, challenge them to find things around the house that have that letter printed on them or objects that begin with that letter’s sound.
9. Fish for Letters
Magnetic letter fishing games may be purchased or made with paper, magnets, paper clips, dowels, and string.
Name or pick a letter, focusing on how it looks and/or sounds. Kids then “fish” for the matching letters from the “pond.”
They can also just fish for a random letter and then name it once it is “caught.”
You can also use a version of this game later on, when children are learning to match upper and lowercase letters.
10. Play Musical Chairs with Letters
Add paper plates with letters or letters cut from cardboard right onto the chairs or onto the floor beneath.
Children walk around the circle and find a place to sit when the music stops. They each then name the letter on their chair or floor directly beneath.
11. Find Letters on a Keyboard
Make use of an old computer keyboard or typewriter. Get kids to name the letters as they touch the keys.
They can also find them to press as you say the names, sounds, or hold up cards, one letter at a time.
12. Spray or Write Letters Outdoors
Offer spray bottles with water for children to spray letters on driveways, sidewalks, or even the side of your house.
Another option is to use sidewalk chalk to write letters on the driveway, patio, or basketball court.
13. Form Letters with Bendable Materials
Get your children to bend pipe cleaners, chenille stems, or products like Wikki Stix (string covered in wax) to form letters.
Children often like to make multiple letters and form words, as well.
14. Find the Hidden Letters
“Bury” plastic or wooden letters in a sand table or sand box.
Ask children to name the letters as they are discovered.
Other materials may be used as alternates in sand tables or large trays, such as coloured rice, pasta, dried beans, or birdseed.
All of these ideas for teaching letter recognition can help to strengthen a child’s early literacy skills.
Pay attention to where they stand in their development and keep raising the bar just a bit higher, while still returning to those games and activities in which they feel a high measure of success.
This is the key to learning.
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How handwriting recognition works - Machine learning on vc.ru
In everyday life, we almost stopped writing by hand, because for many, work and communication are connected with a smartphone, computer, and it is much faster to type than to write with a pen or stylus. However, sometimes this possibility would not be superfluous. Now there is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and it seems that this can be given to devices. In this article, we will analyze how handwriting recognition algorithms work, what are the problems, because until now text input on the keyboard is considered more reliable and faster than writing with a stylus. nine0003
8486 views
Introduction
As a result of recognition, we must receive a text in digital format. There are two types of recognition: online and offline. Online - Recognize text when writing with a stylus or finger on a screen or tablet.
It is immediately clear where the word is written, and where the canvas. The first PDA that could recognize handwriting was the Apple Newton (1993).
An interesting note from the time. nine0003
Offline - recognition of already written text on paper. The text is provided in the form of a scan or photograph of a document, book page, etc. It is a more complicated way, because in the case of the online method, it is possible to trace the process of writing a text and build a recognition algorithm on this fact. The complexity of the task of handwriting recognition is a wide variety of handwritings, shapes, sizes of letters and a variety of languages. Also, paper with text may contain “noises” - paper defects, extraneous spots, which also complicates the whole process. nine0003
Recognition approaches
There are at least two approaches that give an acceptable result: using a hidden Markov model and an artificial neural network (ANN).
In practice, a hybrid approach is also used, using two approaches simultaneously.
Process
Preparation
Preparation includes rectification, threshold binarization, noise removal.
- Threshold binarization is the process of separating the background from an object, in this case text. The result is black text on a white background.
- Noise Removal - Remove artifacts from an image without affecting written text.
Segmentation of lines, words, symbols is also performed. This is the division of text into lines, words and symbols in order to further recognize them using ANN. The fewer lines in the text look like straight lines, the worse the line segmentation algorithm will work. Elementary segmentation into words works on the principle that the distance between words is greater than between letters. nine0003
Segmentation of lines, words and letters
Let's take a closer look at a few of the steps.
Straightening
Tilt Angle - Angle between vertical and writing direction. The straightening step direction is to minimize this angle as much as possible.
Word before straightening
Word after straightening
Word segmentation
Not all algorithms require segmentation. However, let's look at several ways to split text into words.
- A page of text is broken into lines, then the line is broken into words, where space is their separator. To do this, filters are sequentially applied to the text to remove noise and determine the boundaries of words.
- The text is divided into its constituent parts - components and the distance between their centers is calculated. As a parameter of the algorithm, some threshold value of the distance is taken, which can later be selected based on the success of the results. nine0035
- The next approach is also based on distance calculation.
Using the support vector machine, a plane is found that separates two different types of data (characters), and then the text is broken into words using a threshold value.
Support vectors marked with circles
- The last approach uses several ways to calculate the distance between and their combination. nine0038
a - original piece of text, b - bounding box, c - Euclidean distance, d - horizontal distance
Language model
The language model helps the recognition algorithm to improve the result using known language phrases. The language model can predict the next word based on the previous ones and offer options with varying degrees of probability. For example, the phrase "There are" is considered more likely than "Their are". Such a model can be trained on the basis of a large amount of text, with the calculation of repetitions of one word after another. Of course, there is no strong confidence that the language model will be able to predict the next word for any text in all cases, so the model is trained on the text of the same subject as the one being recognized. Using the language model is also optional. nine0003
Prefix tree
The prefix word search algorithm is quite fast and easy to understand. As you might guess, the tree structure is used, where the edges are letters, and the vertex contains a sign of a word. Thus, the word is represented as a path from the root node (the first letter of the word) through the edges - the compound letters of the word to the vertex with the word sign.
In the illustration you can see the representation of the words to, too, a, this, that.
Classification
The input of the classifier can be both images of individual words and entire lines. ANN is made up of layers. This is where all the magic and mathematics happens: first, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are used - convolution and pooling operations, and recurrent neural networks (RNS), namely one of the types LSTM, mdlstm, IDCN.
The essence of convolution is that each image fragment is multiplied by the convolution matrix (kernel) element by element, and the result is summarized and written to a similar position of the output image (a feature map is formed). The pooling operation can significantly reduce the size of the image. Pooling is interpreted as follows: if some features were already identified during the previous convolution operation, then such a detailed image is no longer needed for further processing, and it is compacted to a less detailed one - the dimension of the generated feature maps is reduced. Also, the final result depends on the dataset - a set of images for the model for each letter of a different handwriting. nine0003
Post-processing
Text after classification can be checked for spelling. At this stage, we only have textual information without the original graphic data. For example, the text is broken into words, then checked for presence in the dictionary. If there is no word in the dictionary, but it looks like some kind, an option is offered for correction.
Corrections can also be trained in parallel from the classifier.
Conclusion
nine0009The maximum accuracy of handwriting recognition in English, the results of which were found in open sources, reaches values from 55 to 75%. Post-processing improves the results by an average of 15% for some algorithms, and may worsen the results (up to 3-6%).
Don't forget that the dataset is very important. I could not find any data about the accuracy of tools for recognizing the Russian language. Nevertheless, at the moment the task does not look unsolvable, and with a serious approach to creating a model and training it, one can achieve high recognition results. nine0003
If you are interested in the topic of deep learning, I recommend reading this book. An example implementation of an algorithm for handwriting recognition can be found on GitHub, for example, by this author.
Handwriting recognition - Offtop on DTF
Hello everyone! Recently created a pilot project for handwriting recognition.
The site uses a bunch of three neural networks.
3338 views
The site is able to detect and recognize handwritten words, correct errors in the text without losing its meaning
Website: rehand.ru
Recognition example:
What actions of a person indicate responsiveness What actions of a person indicate responsiveness? My position is that this topic is difficult to disclose. First, the concept of responsiveness is given: responsiveness, the willingness of a person to help others not out of selfish goals, but guided by the desire to help. That is, the actions of such a person should be noble, because, in helping, sometimes you have to sacrifice something, you yourself give up something from a number of others. Also, a truly sympathetic person is ready to say support in any situation, no matter what, no matter how difficult the circumstances, he will make every effort to help, while the lack of responsibility to give up personal aspirations and sacrifice something epic , actions testify to the opposite quality of indifference.
Thus, the responsiveness of a person is evidenced by the noble and selfless deeds committed by a number of other people, dictated by a sense of compassion and the desire to provide support. As a result, "a noble impulse brings its people." Count Rostov agrees with his daughter's opinion. Using the example of Natalia Rostova, the author shows what actions a person can say about a person's responsiveness. N. Beloy respects the heroine for her keen sense of compassion, admires her selfless deed, her desire to help, even if it is necessary to sacrifice something for this. T. ate on the back. nine0135
Example of complex handwriting recognition
In the text proposed for analysis, the Russian Soviet writer Soltsin poses the problem of the value of monuments. Revealing about insignificant structures, it speaks about thought. On the example of the once destroyed Cathedral of Christ the Savior, "Plattel" shows the historical significance. Architectural monument. T.
Ancient buildings, reminders of past events that are of great importance for the country and people. With this example, the author shows the historical chain of architectural monuments. The piece of text is no less important. The writer talks about the humiliation literally given to cities by architectural monuments. Vladimir Alekseevich says that ordinary buildings will not surprise a person, that buildings that show the features of the city, its history, and the spiritual values of the people will attract attention. By this, the author says that architectural monuments make the city unique. Both examples show the importance of architectural developments for the city, for its history and monument. The position of the author is as follows: the value is that they preserve the most important historical events 16. And make the city. I do not agree with the position of the author. It is difficult for me to imagine my city without monuments, but they introduce me to great countries, history, and spiritual values.
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