My Feeble Attempts

I am attempting to teach the alphabet to a group of learning disabled first graders.  The key word is attempting.  After a rough first few weeks of just trying to get them to memorize the letter symbols and their accompanying sounds with little to no luck,  I decided to try something I had read about in my research of Waldorf Education.  I am very intrigued with Waldorf Education and I really like the philosophies.  This is a great website with a lot of information.

Anyway, back to what I've been working on.  I decided that just a mark on a piece of paper to mean a letter is not getting through to these kids.  They needed to see the shape of the letter in a picture with an accompanying story with the sounds the letters make to go with it to keep their attention and to somehow make the letters mean more to them than just a few scribbles on a page.  I also decided to teach the lowercase first because lowercase letters are more often seen than uppercase.  I have attempted to draw and color, with pastels, four pictures with four dinky little stories and so far the kids that I've been working with have enjoyed the pictures and have been asking to hear the new stories and to hear ones I've told before again. The stories are lame and the pictures are extremely simple but I'm pretty happy about the kid's progress so far. They are beginning to  remember the letter names and sounds when I test them.  The true test will be when I finish all of the pictures and stories and test all of the alphabet together. 

Pardon the picture quality.  I forgot to bring my camera to take photos of them at work so I had to make due with my phone's camera. 

Ann the Angel

Bob the Butterfly

Cedric the Cat

and Don the Deer

I have tried to incorporate multiple letter sounds into the names of the drawings just for that little extra emphasis.  So I will be working on the letter e tonight.  I'm thinking about doing an elephant somehow.  I don't know.  If anyone has ANY ideas for letter pictures please let me know! I'm running low in the idea department, at least with some of the tougher letters.