My Book of Lowercase Letters (Revised Ed.)

The first stage of preparation for readingAt first glance, this book appears to be a simple workbook to help learn to draw lowercase letters. It is that, but used according to the instructions, it’s much more than that. The book also introduces the concept of letters being parts of words, and critically, it teaches the association of the letters with their sounds, the first step toward being able to sound out words and read.The workbook introduces the lowercase letters one at a time, in an order from simplest to most difficult to draw. Thus it starts with a letter that requires only a single straight line – l – and ends with the letters that involve combination of curves with straight lines, like d. For my two sons, starting with such an easy letter helped create enthusiasm for the book; the fact that the first word in the book is “lion” probably didn’t hurt either.Each letter, when introduced, is introduced with two words beginning with that letter. The words are accompanied by pictures, so the child can usually guess the words without knowing how to recognize the letters. The child is supposed to “read” each of the words – in cases where the picture is ambiguous, an adult may need to read it and let the child repeat it – and then the child traces the letter five times while saying the sound of the letter. Saying the sound – not the name – of the letter, while writing it within a visual tracing guide, provides an association between the visual, audible, and proprioceptive value of the letter that is extremely helpful in learning reading and writing skills later on.On the back of the page for each letter are four words that begin with that letter, each word appearing twice. The child is to “read” the words, then say the sound of the letter as it is traced at the beginning of each of the eight word appearances. This gives the child the experience of writing letters as parts of words and further reinforces the association between the letter and its sound.After every third letter – the first three being l, t, and i, for example – there is a review page that includes tracing of each of the three letters four more times by itself, then on the back of that page, tracing each letter at the beginning of two words that begin with that letter. The individual letter pages and review pages make up a total of 70 pages.After all the letters have been completed in this way, the letters are traced in alphabetical order in two ways. First, they are traced nine at a time – for example, a through i – twice, on a total of 6 pages. Then they are traced with the entire alphabet on a single page, three times, with progressively lighter tracing guides, making 3 more pages. Finally, there is a page where the entire alphabet of letters are written in squares with no tracing guides, being copied from a small printed letter beside each square rather than being traced. In the end, there are a total of 80 workbook pages, and each letter is traced or written 25 times.Before starting this book, the child should have some fine motor skill – say, being able to draw a recognizable stick figure of a human – and perhaps be starting to learn the alphabet. Having already memorized the alphabet is nice but not necessary. If the child has trouble drawing a stick figure, but can use a pencil grip, it may be better to start with the previous book in the Kumon preschool English sequence,  My First Book Of Uppercase Letters (Kumon Workbooks) . If the child cannot yet draw within a half inch wide guide, the best starting point may be the first two books in the Kumon preschool series,  My First Book Of Tracing (Kumon Workbooks)  and  My Book of Amazing Tracing (Kumon Workbooks) .The next book in the sequence after this lowercase letters book is  My Book of Alphabet Games , which provides additional practice on both uppercase and lowercase letters, reinforces alphabetical order, and reinforces the association between the uppercase and lowercase forms of each letter. That book also addresses the point made in several other reviews that many children could benefit from more repetition than is in this lowercase letters book. Alternatively, the child may skip directly to  My Book Of Rhyming Words (Kumon Workbooks) .My older son completed this book at age 5 the summer before kindergarten. By the end of the book he was able to form cute but highly legible letters without the tracing guides. For him, I skipped past the alphabet games book to the rhyming words book. That way he could start working on words and not just letters, in preparation for actual reading. After the rhyming words book and the subsequent rhyming words and phrases book, he could reliably sound out simple words and was ready to start learning to read. The down side was that he was not immediately clear on the differentiation between uppercase and lowercase letters, which took some time to learn.My younger son worked through this lowercase letters book when he was three. By the end of the book, he had mastered the sounds associated with lowercase letters, but was not yet able reliably to draw letters clearly. He proceeded to the alphabet games book, which gave him more practice drawing letters and mastering the lowercase and uppercase alphabet, but at the cost of some confusion between letter names and letter sounds. This confusion was largely corrected while working through the subsequent rhyming words and rhyming words and phrases books.As with all Kumon books, this book is self paced. You may have noticed that my younger son, at 3, was not in the recommended age range for this book of 4-6 years old. That is because he loudly voiced a desire for workbooks like his older siblings had when he was 2, so he got an age appropriate book to work on, the first book of tracing. He then worked though that and two additional workbooks in the series, and the lowercase letters book was next in line. His young age may have had something to do with his imperfect letter drawing, but he learned well the associations between letters and sounds, which was really the key foundational skill of this book for later reading.In summary, this workbook teaches how to write lowercase letters, and when the instructions are followed, also teaches sound and letter shape associations critical for later reading and writing. It is an integral part of the Kumon toddler and preschool sequence of workbooks. I strongly recommend this series to provide the foundation for strong reading and writing skills later on.