The Letter P
Alphabet Games
The letter P is the sixteenth letter in the alphabet. When students sing their ABCs, P becomes sort of a showcase letter simply because of its place in the song’s rhythm. Nevertheless, P is one of the less frequently used letters. It comes in at number twenty in frequency of use when tested with 40,000 words of text.As a phoneme, P is interesting. When students learn to read the word “pat”, for example, they have an opportunity to practice three separate phonemes, one for each letter. Invite students to hold their hands in front of their mouths as they say “pat”. They’ll be able to feel the explosive air movement that saying P creates. If they keep their hand up through the whole word, they’ll notice how different the movement of air is for a P and a T. They’ll also notice that A doesn’t send a puff of air to their hand. In its lowercase form, P can easily be confused with a lowercase Q, a lowercase G or even sometimes a lowercase B or D. Lots of practice with letter games will help students master letter recognition with the letter P and all the letters of the alphabet.
