Ever since writing my post about Charlotte Mason and kindergarten, I’ve been trying to get more familiar with Froebel’s ideas. Friedrich Froebel lived in the late 18th century and early 19th century, and his principles on early education deemed him the affectionate title “the father of the Kindergarten.” Unfortunately, Froebel did not have an outstanding way with words, as pointed out in an introduction to his collection of letters explaining his Kindergarten principles, Froebel’s Letters. His works are a little cumbersome to read. There are a lot of ideas that Charlotte Mason accepted as valuable for young children, and some of them that she dismissed with sharp allusions in her her volumes
Froebel’s Alphabet Sticks
In “How Lina Learned to Write and Write,” Froebel described a reading instruction method that is pretty different than what Charlotte Mason described. Lina, at the age of six, showed an interest in reading a letter that her father had received. So, her mother took her outside and taught her how to make letters with sticks. Mother taught her each sound in her name at first, and then she made the letter with thin, small sticks. The rest of the process is somewhat similar: she learned an interesting word, like “father” or “mother”, by learning each sound and its symbol, and then writing it with sticks.
While Charlotte Mason thought that reading and writing were a bit more separate than this, I think the process of writing letters with sticks is engaging, low-maintenance (which I always look for!) and can be done nearly anywhere.
Suggestions
Froebel recommended using thin sticks for this process. We have a pretty silver maple tree, and the smaller branches are perfect for this. We’ve also collected willow boughs before, and their flexible branches would work well for alphabet sticks, too.
Letters with straight lines (like H and T) are the obvious choices when building letters with sticks, but Froebel recommended using a thumbnail to pierce a thin stick to make it bend easily to build letters with curved lines, like R and P. You could even get creative and add in little pebbles or the flexible stems of ubiquitous dandelions. Instead of introducing an entire word and its letters all at once as Froebel recommended, choose a letter that represents the beginning of a familiar word, and introduce it. Teaching an entire word’s worth of letters is a little more ambitious than Charlotte Mason’s approach!
Miss H and I built some letters on the ground, as Froebel mentioned, but we also tied some of the letters together with twine. She had fun playing with the letters for a few days!
When to Start
You can introduce this activity when your child shows interest in letters, although it is probably best with children at least three years and older. Your littlest children can join in too, like mine did! He loved rearranging the sticks for me 🙂
Why I Love This
I’m always on the search for ideas that fit with Charlotte Mason’s methods. This stood out to me for a few reasons. 1) H and I have done something very similar to this before. She had a ton of fun with it, and it was a natural, by the way learning experience. 2) It’s outside! Anything that we can do outside always has the added benefit of appealing to all the senses.
Other Ideas for Learning the ABC’s Outdoors
- Shadow letters: Why not get creative, and make letters with stick shadows? See if your little ones can experiment with holding up multiple sticks to make shadow letters.
- Mud drawing: When it’s muddy outside, use sticks to write letters in the mud.
- Stick hunt: Sometimes sticks just naturally look like letters. What kind of stick shapes can you find? (We’ve found Y, L, etc.)
- Twine sticks: Wrap your alphabet sticks in twine so they keep their shape. Connect the two sticks by wrapping the twine around them several times, and then tying a knot.
, which we love. But this year, I hope to combine several of the beautiful Bible storybooks we have with actual Bible verses.
– This is aimed at an older audience, but it hasn’t been too difficult for Miss H to understand. (That’s why it’s so important to practice reading quality literature from the start- a child’s ability to listen and comprehend becomes very strong!) The language very closely mimics that of the NIV version, but parts of it are a little more narrative.
 I know the Jesus Calling series is not for everyone! Sometimes I skip the short devotional, and if I don’t, I explain that this is what the author felt like Jesus was saying to her. I really like the way the stories are told in this Bible storybook, and it includes some different stories than the Jesus Storybook Bible.
– This is my own journaling Bible that I’ll read from occasionally. It has some coloring and writing pages in it, so I might share them with Miss H, who I’m sure will be eager to join in 🙂
) but I imagine that by being more intentional with reading every morning, we’ll get through books more quickly. With that in mind, we need six books for the year- our sixth book just arrived from Amazon, but I want to read it before telling you about it 🙂 A few of our morning time books are from Ambleside Online’s year zero list. Some appear in later years for Ambleside Online. This doesn’t bother me because I don’t mind reading them again two years from now. That’s the joy of a living book!
and Little House on the Prairie together. I know this would drive some people crazy as they prefer to read books by their publication order! But this was right for us because Miss H was so invested in Mary and Laura’s lives!
– I’m excited to read this to Miss H in December! Last year, she loved watching snippets of the Nutcracker Ballet online. Although it isn’t technically a chapter book, it has 120 and some complex language, so it will probably take us awhile to get through. I haven’t read this specific translation before, but I’m excited for the Maurice Sendak illustrations.
(we also use this book to talk about 
in each square as they heard a sound. You can easily make your own boxes in a program like Microsoft Word, or you can find printables all over the Internet (
