What is alphabet search?
Alphabet search is looking for letters of the alphabet with your child or encouraging your child to look.
It’s a search-and-find activity that you and your child can do on a road trip.
Why is alphabet search a good road trip activity for kids?
Alphabet search is a fun way to build your child’s early literacy skills. It gives your child practice in recognising letters, and it makes this activity fun. Children often love search-and-find games like alphabet search, because they get praise for being the first to find something.
Alphabet search is also a great road trip activity for you and your child because you don’t have to take your attention off the road to do it.
Alphabet search is great as a quick circuit breaker when your child starts to ask, ‘Are we there yet?’
What you need for alphabet search on a road trip
You can do alphabet search anytime you’re in the car with your child. You don’t need anything for this activity, and you don’t need to plan for it.
How to do alphabet search on a road trip
Ideas to get you started on alphabet search
- Remind your child that you can’t take your eyes off the road, so you won’t be able to look if your child is pointing to something in another direction.
- Ask one person to pick a letter. Everyone else tries to find the letter on number plates, street signs, expressway signs or advertising material that you pass on the road.
- Let the person who finds the letter first pick the next letter. Or you can take turns to pick letters.
Options
You can make the game more exciting by putting time limits on the search. For example:
- How many letter Ms can you find in 5 minutes?
- Can you find 5 letter Es before we pass a red truck in the other lane?
Keeping children comfortable and engaged in the car can make it easier to drive safely. For safety, it’s also important to make sure your child knows that you can’t turn around while you’re driving.
How to adapt alphabet search for children of different ages
There are many ways to adapt this simple search-and-find game for your child’s age.
For example, many children will enjoy looking for numbers rather than letters sometimes. This can be a great way to build early numeracy skills.
Younger children
- Make the activity more collaborative. For example, ‘Let’s find an O. Is that one on the beginning of the street sign there? Can you see it? It looks like a circle’.
- Ask your child to look for colours rather than letters. For example, ‘Let’s find a red car’.
- Ask your child to look for shapes rather than letters. For example, ‘Let’s find a circle’.
Older children
- Ask your child to find the letters of a word. For example, ask your child to find the letters of their name. Your child might find the first letter on a street sign, the second on a number plate and so on.
- Ask your child to find combinations of numbers that add up to another one. For example, you could ask your child to find numbers that add up to 12. Your child might find 6 and 5 first, and then keep looking until they find a 1.
How to adapt alphabet search for children with diverse abilities
There are many ways to adapt this simple search-and-find game for children of diverse abilities.
For example:
- If your child has learning difficulties, it can help to break the instructions into smaller steps and repeat them as needed.
- If your child is still developing their literacy skills, you could try the activities suggested for younger children above. These include looking for colours or shapes rather than letters.
You can get more ideas for adapting this activity from our articles on play and autistic children and play and children with disability. You might also like to explore our other activity guides. They can all be adapted to suit children with diverse strengths and abilities.