ABC book

An alphabet book is a book primarily designed for young children. It presents letters of the alphabet with corresponding words and/or images. Some alphabet books feature capitals and lower case letter forms, keywords beginning with specific letters, or illustrations of keywords. Alphabet books may consist of sentences, paragraphs, or entire pages highlighting letters and corresponding keywords in a variety of creative and imaginative formats.

Alphabet books introduce the sounds and letters of the ordered alphabet. These books provide a non-threatening genre in which children engage in a variety of both fiction and non-fiction texts. Alphabet books provide opportunities for:

The hornbook, a form of ABC book, was common by Shakespeare's day. It consisted of a piece of parchment or paper pasted on a wooden board and protected by a leaf of horn. Hornbooks displayed letters of the alphabet, a and prayers for novice readers. Andrew Tuer described a typical hornbook with a line separating the lower case and capital letters from the syllabary. This syllabarium or syllabary, likely added to the hornbook in 1596, taught pronunciations of vowel and consonant combinations.

These syllables are possible ancestors to the modern instructional practice of new readers working with onsets and rimes in word families. From the first hornbook, the alphabet format cemented the learning progression from syllables to words.

An example of the reliance on the alphabet for reading instruction is found in John Bunyan's, A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rhymes for Children.

As referenced in this verse, it was an expectation of the period that “babes” began as readers with knowledge of the alphabet. Armed with the letters of the alphabet from the hornbook, children encountered other early forms of reading materials.

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