How to teach the English Alphabet with Flashcards + Free Printable

Teaching your child reading starts as early as infancy! Babies can distinguish between high contrasting colours and recognize different sounds. Taking advantage of these facts, you can very early start teaching your child to recognize the English Alphabets and their sounds. And flashcards are the best for such a task!

In this blog post, we have included 6 printer-friendly versions for the English Alphabet. These Free Printables come in black and red, and either lowercase, uppercase or doublesided upper- and lowercase. We also have a tutorial to guide you on how to print these cards.

For older children, we have 3 simple English Alphabet Flashcard games that are both fun and educational.

Then check out our Resource Overview of Flashcards for Kindergarten. It is an amazing resource with FREE colourful english flashcards for the alphabet, numbers, animals, and much more. It is a resource you definitely need to bookmark and add to your teaching box.

Teaching the English Alphabet

Learning the letter sounds is very important in your journey of teaching your child to read. It is more important than teaching them the names of the letters.

That’s why we recommend starting with the letter sounds until your child have mastered them then moving to the alphabet names.

You can teach your children the sounds of the letters by showing them one alphabet flashcard at a time and pronouncing the sound 2-3 times. We recommend starting with the lowercase letters as this is the form children are most exposed to in books.

You can repeat this exercise once or twice daily. Eventually your child will be able to recognize these letters and repeat their sounds.

For an excellent video to teach the letter sounds, check out this video by an amazing Homeschooling mom, Jady A.

English Alphabet Flashcards (Free Printables)

(Click on the links to download)

Printing Tutorial

3 Simple Alphabet Flashcard Games

1) Matching Game

Download and print both of our lower- and uppercase letters sets. Set out 2-3 cards of each set then ask your child to match between the lower and the uppercase letters.
You can play this game with the alphabet letters set from Flashcards for Kindergarten and ask your child to match between the image and the letter. Ask your child say out loud the names of the objects and the beginning sound.
For more advanced learners, you can ask them to match between the image and the word. As them to read all the words before they start matching the cards.

2) Memory Game

You can play the matching game but with flipping the cards over to add an extra challenge. You would set out 2-5 image cards and 2-5 letter or word cards flipped.
Your child would reveal 2 cards at a time. If the cards match, they are removed from the table. If they do not match, they would be flipped back.
This is repeated until all the cards are matched.

3) Write it out!

Lay out an image card beside a small chalk board or dry/erase board. Ask your child to pronounce the first letter and then to identify the image. After that, ask them to write the letter down.
For more advanced learners, ask them to write the whole word out.

Flashcards for Kindergarten: Resource Overview

You can advance your child’s learning of the alphabet by associating the alphabet sound with a word. For example, “A” for an “Apple”, “B” for a “Bat”, etc. For excellent sets Alphabet Flashcards with images, check out Flashcards for Kindergarten.

Consecutively, you can start teaching your child how to write both lower- and uppercase letters through tracing. For letter tracing sets, check out Flashcards for Kindergarten.

There are also posters you can hang in your child’s room or homeschooling room, as well as other sets of flashcards with explanatory videos on how to use them.

Check out this video of our resource overview of Flashcards for Kindergarten.