Letter of the Week: Does It Work?
One letter, one week, twenty-six weeks, done by the summer. It is tidy, it is easy to plan, and it is what most nurseries and a great many homes do.
The criticisms of it are real. So are its advantages. Here is the fair version.
The case against
It is slow. Twenty-six weeks is most of a school year to cover a set of symbols. A child who could be reading simple words by November instead meets the letters that make those words in March.
Alphabetical order is the wrong order. A, B, C, D gives you almost nothing to read. Meanwhile s, a, t, p, i, n gives you sat, tap, pin, nap, pat and dozens more — real words, in week one.
It over-weights the letter's shape and name and under-weights its sound, because a week of crafts around the shape of B naturally drifts towards bee rather than /b/.
Children do not learn on a schedule. Some letters take a day, some take a month, and a fixed week fits neither.
The case for
It gives a rhythm, which matters more in a classroom of twenty-four than critics of it usually admit. It makes planning possible. It gives parents something to follow. And repeated exposure across a whole week, in several forms, genuinely does help things stick.
If the alternative is nothing, letter of the week is much better than nothing.
The two changes that fix most of it
1. Change the order. Keep the one-a-week rhythm, but not alphabetically. Start with the high-frequency, easily-blended letters so the child can read real words within a fortnight. Reading something is the motivation engine for everything after it; alphabetical order delays it for months.
2. Lead with the sound. Whatever the craft is, the repeated line is the sound, not the name. "S says /s/" a hundred times in a week is what you want. The name will arrive from the song, the alphabet frieze and everywhere else.
Make those two changes and most of the objection disappears.
A third, if you can
Do not wait for a letter's week to use it. Once a child has four sounds, start blending them into words immediately, using the letters they have. Letter of the week goes wrong when it becomes twenty-six separate topics rather than a running total.
If you are doing this at home
You have an advantage a classroom does not: you can move at your child's pace. Spend three days on an easy letter and two weeks on a hard one. Nobody is waiting.
And attach each letter to something the child actually cares about. A letter with an animal, a song and a story attached is remembered; a letter that arrives as a worksheet is remembered for about a week.
That is the whole idea behind twenty-six fables with twenty-six songs — every letter arrives carrying an animal, a behaviour and a tune, so the child has three ways back to it. It also means the week has content beyond the letter itself, which is the other quiet problem with letter of the week: by Thursday there is often nothing left to do.
The verdict
Keep the rhythm. Change the order. Lead with the sound. Blend early.
Done that way, it is a perfectly good structure. Done alphabetically with the names foregrounded, it is a year spent on something that could have taken a term.
Five-minute play ideas for each letter