The friendly frog is very hungry. Help her catch a tasty fly by demonstrating your knowledge of the alphabet.
- Adjust the volume on your computer to a comfortable level.
- When you are ready, click once on the frog. You will hear a spoken letter name.
- Click on the matching printed letter. The frog will catch the correct letter with its tongue.
- Click once on the frog to begin the next round.
Continue playing until the challenge stops automatically. When you are finished, you’ll get your results, and you can read about the relationship between reading skills and tasks like ABC Gulp.
ABC Gulp challenges your knowledge of letter names
All children need to learn their ABCs. By learning to recognize and name each letter in the alphabet, children take their first steps into the world of written language. Many children master letter-naming before they start kindergarten, and almost all children have mastered it by the time they finish, so ABC Gulp should be relatively easy for children six and older. The skills of younger children, however, may vary widely: some can identify and name all twenty-six letters in the alphabet, while others can’t name any letters at all. Still other children are familiar with the first half of the alphabet, but struggle with the second half. For these children six and under, ABC Gulp results may be particularly important, because letter-naming is one of the most effective predictors of subsequent reading skills.
Is letter-naming easy? While learning a set of twenty-six arbitrary associations takes time and practice, letter-naming isn’t fundamentally different from other developmental hurdles. Young children are accustomed to naming visual objects, and often enjoy doing so. A typical three-year-old, for example, can look at a line drawing of a cocker spaniel or a color photo of a poodle and declare "Doggie!" in both cases. These same visual skills probably help children recognize letters that occur in different fonts, colors, and sizes. Children draw on their phonological resources, too. They may recognize the sounds of letter names from the ABC Song, or from common nouns such as bee, sea, and tea. Still, the ABCs do present challenges. Infrequent letters may be harder to learn. And some children struggle with the visual similarities between lower-case letters like b and d, or p and q.
The connection between the ABCs and reading
Segmenting letter names into phonemes
Naming skills and dyslexia
