ABC Dot to Dot: Join the Letters from A to T

Letters, not numbers, stand beside the dots on this Kindergarten dot-to-dot. Twenty of them fill the cream panel, lettered a, b, c and on through to t in small lowercase print, with a ringed in orange to mark the beginning. The child joins them in alphabet order until the outline closes and a picture appears, and on some figures a small detail is printed in already. Underneath the panel sits a strip of those same twenty letters, a to t in little circles, so the letter that comes next can be looked up rather than recalled.

Singing the alphabet and using it are different abilities. A child who chants the song fluently may still be unable to answer what follows n without starting again from the beginning, and that gap is what this page pushes against: twenty times over, the next letter has to be produced and then hunted for among nineteen others. The middle stretch is where it shows. L, m, n, o, p are sung as one blurred run and separate out slowly on paper, and the alphabet strip is there so a child can find them rather than guess. Ask for each letter to be named aloud and you will hear the trouble before you see it.

Print the PDF free and cover nothing; the strip along the bottom is meant to be used, and reading o off it is still reading. This suits a child who knows most letter shapes but has never had to put them in order, and it makes a quiet alternative to a numbered sheet for a group that has only just met the alphabet. The dot to dot 1-20 page is the counting version of the same picture task, and trace and write words is where these letters start being formed rather than only found.