Activities: Stages of Alphabetizing
Here are some activities that develop organizational thinking skills. And a note about Hangman.
When children first learn the alphabet song, they are being initiated into a massive social project of a shared system for organizing information. Other than the sequence of numbers, the alphabet is likely the longest ordered list that is shared by millions and millions of people. While one has to imagine that alphabetic systems of organization must have existed at various points in ancient cultures, the earliest known example of a large scale system of information organized alphabetically is the Pinakes (Greek for tables or tablets) in the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BCE. A person named Callimachus created the Pinakes, the first or one of the first library catalogs in the world. Although it never survived, there are references to the Pinakes that let us know that Callimachus had all the scrolls in the library cataloged by by both category and by author’s name.
There are many ways to organize information and people have debated for centuries whether or not large systems of information (e.g. Encyclopedias) are best organized using an alphabetic system. In 1803, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a critique of Encyclopedias being alphabetized: “The desired information is divided into innumerable fragments scattered over many volumes, like a mirror broken on the ground, presenting, instead of one, a thousand images, but none entire …” He has a point. Does it make sense that you’d read about “Japan” in a different volume than you would read about “Asia?” Here is an article on this topic that you might find interesting or useful in teaching some of the complexities of alphabetic order: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/alphabetical-order-is-not-always-as-easy-as-abc-20200615-p552p9.html
That being said, alphabetic systems do exist and there is no question that honing a child’s mind to enjoy playing with this system—to understand its possibilities and its limitations—can be a valuable exercise. Here are a few stages of alphabetic exercises that can take this work from simple to complex and from practical to theoretical.
Stage 1: As soon as children know the alphabet song and are comfortably able to recognize written letters, you can start playing alphabetizing games or setting out alphabetizing activities. Use paper and pencil, alphabet blocks, magnets, cards, or any other tools you have around to represent letters. If you are homeschooling or teaching in an elementary classroom, using something like a moveable Montessori alphabet can be a nice investment. I use a set like this at school for a lot of games and activities around word-building, so I find it to be a worthwhile investment. Pay attention to whether or not your child knows lower case letters. Many children work with upper case letters only in their earliest stages of literacy. Others are capable of recognizing both upper and lower case letters.
Simple cards:
https://www.amazon.com/Lower-Capital-Case-Sandpaper-Letters/dp/B073JDRM2V?ref_=ast_sto_dp
Larger sets:
https://www.amazon.com/Movable-Alphabet-Montessori-Letters-Moveable/dp/B0B9HYP969?ref_=ast_sto_dp
Stage 1: Letter Order
Before you start having them practice the activity of ordering letters, make sure that the child can use these cards or blocks to lay out the entire alphabet in order from start to finish. And make sure that they have some sense of how to represent that order visually. (Presumably they’ve already seen or learned a left-right orientation.)
Assuming they can do that, a good first-stage activity is simply asking which letter comes before the other in the alphabet. Start with the easiest: put B and A in front of the child. Now try A and C: which one comes first? What about C and B? D and F? See what questions come up from the child as they do this. Don’t just insist on the right answer: listen to the questions they ask and the ideas they have. If they are making mistakes, try to respond neutrally and pay attention to the logic they use to order letters. You always have to address the underlying logical structures they are building for themselves. This is one of the key ideas behind teaching critical thinking around language—if you assume that your framework is the one that makes sense and simply repeat it to a child, your explanation may not having a lasting effect if you don’t understand what other ideas are competing in their minds.
Once they understand this idea of order based on the alphabet song, they can start doing harder pairs with letters further into the alphabet: J and I, W and V, etc. They don’t have to be letters near one another. It’s interesting to see how quickly a child can block the alphabet into chunks. They might have to sing the song to remember if X or W comes first, but how quickly do they know that F definitely comes before S? Start getting a feeling for which aspects of the alphabet are intuitive for a child and which seem more difficult to track.
As you can imagine, there is nothing essential about this skill for a young child, but you start to get a sense of how easy or hard it is for them to connect symbols to sounds and to sort those symbols into a lexicographical order. They are practicing skills of decoding, memory, and mental organization.
Stage 2: Word Order
This is the stage that prepares students for working with a dictionary. This is best for children who are already reading/sounding out three-letter words. (Throughout this work, you may come across the term CVC words: this means consonant-vowel-consonant words like map.) Start this project with only 1-, 2-, and 3-letter words. Begin with a short list of words that start with different letters: (CAT, ANT, DOG, PET, FAN, RED, BIG) and see if the child can understand the idea of organizing words in “alphabetical order” by putting words that start with A before words that start with B, etc.
Once they are adept at organizing lists of words that have words starting with different letters, introduce the question of what one does when you have two words that start with the same letter. “PAT” and “PET” could be a good pair of words. Important: Don’t start by telling the child how the alphabetic system works. Ask the child how they would choose an order. It may well be that they can deduce the structure, or they will reveal something interesting about how they think about words structurally.
Once they understand how to deal with PAT and PET, move onto CAT and CAR and CAMP. See what happens now. Soon enough, the child (with some guidance from you) should be able to deduce and even perhaps explain the system of alphabetization for you. Now you can combine the work from the first exercise and this exercise and help the child move onto longer lists of words with mixes of words and ordering them. At the top of this article, there is an image that contains the 860 words that have their letters in alphabetical order. That can be a fun game to play with a child: which words have the letters in them in alphabetical order: Does CAT? No. Does COT? Yes! You can also teach them words like “facetious” and “abstemious” that have all the vowels in alphabetical order.
Stage 3: Dictionaries
A little dictionary work early on (6-8 years old) can be instructive, but dictionaries are often most fun to work with more extensively for students in 4th-6th grade ages. This is in part because it actually takes quite a bit of regular coordination and fine motor skills to use a dictionary and sometimes the process becomes more physically challenging for younger children than it is mentally challenging. This can put them off from the practice too early. However, there are no absolutes when it comes to children. Some seven year olds may love looking up words in the dictionary. In this 9-11 year-old range, it is also beneficial because these ages are starting to have a fuller sense of the nuance of words and of the many connotations of words. Working with dictionaries tends to be more fruitful when this is the case. I will do a longer post on Dictionary activities at a later date. All I will share for now is that I once had a 5th grade class who loved looking up words in the dictionary so much that, when we were reading some Shakespeare together and they came across the word “untreasured” in As You Like It, they were eager to find it in the dictionary and when they didn’t, I told them about the complete Oxford English Dictionary. That spring, they decided to host a walkathon to raise money as a class to purchase the complete OED for our school library. It is still in our school library to this day. All because some voraciously inquisitive 10 year olds were not satisfied that their dictionary did not have a word in it. I promise you, this was not my idea.
All I did as a teacher was believe that they could care about the meanings of words.
Stage 4: Incorporating outlier cases and other languages
For a group who is really excited about language and who love thinking deeply about systems and how they are organized, there are so many wonderful examples of ways to complicate learning about alphabetical order. Here are a few things you can play with.
Celtic names with Mc and Mac or O’ (how should these be handled in lists of names?). Other surnames that have two parts: names with Le or La as well as van or city names: consider M’Banza-Kongo in Angola that has both an apostrophe and a hyphen. Should those features change how it’s placed in a list or not? What do with the word Saint vs. its abbreviation St when it shows up in names?
Numbers in titles. Often titles with numbers where the number is written in Arabic numerals rather than spelled out are placed ahead of the As in alphabetized lists. What do students think of this practice? Does that make sense?
How should spaces affect list ordering? If you have two towns, one called Top Ridge and one called Topridge, what order will they go in and why?
How should you treat the definite and indefinite article when alphabetizing titles? Should you include The and A as the defining first word of a title when making a library shelf? Wouldn’t every book that starts with The be next to one another in the library?
Olympic marches. It can be interesting to study how languages affect the order in which countries march in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. It often changes depending on how the country is named in the language of the host nation. This is a good example of an exercise that can help “de-center” English for children. Wikipedia has pages that show how the nations were ordered alphabetically. Here are a few samples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Summer_Olympics_Parade_of_Nations (Korean)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Summer_Olympics_Parade_of_Nations (Greek)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Winter_Olympics_Parade_of_Nations (Mandarin Chinese)
How to alphabetize when you have to include languages with more expansive alphabets than English. Languages like Swedish and Hungarian and French have vowels with symbols that indicate different pronunciations. Should that affect alphabetization? Should an ö be placed differently than an ø or an ô?
There are many more facets of alphabetization that you can explore with a child, but the hope is that you can see what a rich world of learning is available in just this one topic alone.
I am going to end with a note about the game Hangman. You can use something like Wordle if Hangman seems old-fashioned or distasteful to you. While alphabetical order may seem like a natural way to organize the alphabet, there are other orders you can impose on our alphabet. Frequency is one of the most interesting. You can show how hard it is to lose hangman with most words if you just guess in order of frequency. You can also have fun thinking about words that would are good stumpers if your opponent guesses by frequency. For example, a simple word like “Jazz” is a great hangman word to stymie a frequency strategy. While they would get the “A” on their second guess, they wouldn’t arrive at an answer until the 24th and 25th letters had been guessed. Good fun for thinking about other ways to organize an alphabet.