Why Letter of the Week Is Too Slow for Most Young Kids

A Beloved Classroom Tradition, Reconsidered

Letter of the week is everywhere: one letter gets a full week of songs, crafts, snacks that start with that sound, and a bulletin board display, before the class moves on to the next one. It feels thorough, cozy, and complete. It's also, according to the research on how children actually learn the alphabet, slower than it needs to be for most kids.

What the Research Actually Found

Letter-of-the-week is common enough in early childhood classrooms that many parents assume it must be backed by strong evidence. The research that has actually tested pacing head-to-head points the other way.

A kindergarten study directly compared a traditional letter-a-week pace against introducing a new letter daily with short, distributed review cycles woven back in - and found meaningfully fewer children ended up at risk for reading difficulty under the faster, more frequently-reviewed approach (Jones & Reutzel, 2012). Separately, a study that compared a slower and a faster rate of introducing new letter-sound correspondences to kindergarteners with limited early literacy skills found that the faster pace didn't come at a cost: children in the faster group learned the shared set of correspondences just as well as the slower group, and modestly outperformed them on several reading and spelling measures (Vadasy & Sanders, 2021). Together, these point away from "one letter, one full week" as the ideal pace for most children.

Why Slower Isn't Actually Safer

It's easy to assume that more time per letter means better mastery, but that instinct misses how memory actually works for young children. A single, intense week of exposure to one letter, followed by weeks without seeing it again, isn't a strong recipe for long-term retention. Short, frequent, spaced-out practice - seeing a letter again and again in small doses over time - tends to build more durable knowledge than one long concentrated block followed by silence.

There's also an opportunity cost to the slow pace. With 26 letters and a school year of roughly 36 weeks, letter-of-the-week barely leaves room to also revisit letters that need more practice, and it delays the point where a child has learned enough letters to start blending them into real words - which is the actual goal, not letter recognition for its own sake.

This Isn't About Rushing

It's worth being clear about what this research doesn't say. It isn't an argument for cramming, drilling all 26 letters in a single frantic week, or treating alphabet knowledge as a race. The actual recommendation is almost the opposite of rushed: smaller, more frequent doses of each letter, spread out and repeated over time, rather than one large dose that's never revisited. A five-minute daily touch on several letters, old and new together, is a gentler rhythm for most children than one intense themed week followed by weeks of silence on that letter.

What to Do Instead

The practical version of "daily introduction plus repeated review" doesn't require a classroom or a curriculum - you can build it into normal life:

1. Introduce a new letter more often than weekly. Even a new letter every few days, rather than a fresh one every seven, moves a child through the alphabet at a pace that matches what the research favors.
2. Bring back letters you've already taught, regularly. Don't let a letter disappear once its "week" (or day) is over - work it into games, books, and casual pointing-out for weeks afterward.
3. Don't wait for full mastery before moving on. A child doesn't need to have a letter perfectly memorized before the next one is introduced; repeated exposure over time, not one long session, is what builds the lasting knowledge.
4. Prioritize letters that unlock real words fast. Teaching a handful of common, useful letters early lets your child start blending into actual words sooner, which is itself motivating and reinforcing.

How to Practice at Home

• Rotate through letters quickly, then keep looping back. A fast first pass plus ongoing review beats one slow, thorough pass with no return visits.
• Mix old and new every session. Spend most of a short practice session on letters already introduced, with just a little time on the newest one.
• Use very short, frequent sessions. Several three-to-five-minute touches across a week build more than one long weekly unit.
• Let real words drive the pace. As soon as a small group of letters is known, start blending them into words - that's more motivating than isolated letter drills and reinforces the letters at the same time.
• Don't panic about "unfinished" letters. If a letter doesn't feel solid after its first pass, that's expected - it'll get more practice on the next loop through, not become a stalled failure point.

If Your Child's Classroom Still Does Letter of the Week

If your child's preschool or kindergarten classroom uses a letter-of-the-week structure, that's not a reason to worry or to try to override it - group settings have their own constraints, and a weekly theme can still work fine as the classroom's organizing structure. What you can do at home is simply add faster, more frequent review on top of it: touch base on letters from previous weeks a few times, rather than only during "their" week, and don't be shy about introducing the next letter a little early if your child seems ready before the calendar says so.

The Takeaway

Letter-of-the-week feels thorough because it's slow and deliberate, but the research on how children actually retain alphabet knowledge points the other way: shorter, more frequent exposure to each letter, with real repeated review over time, builds stronger knowledge than one long concentrated week ever will. If you're also weighing whether to lead with letter names or sounds as you pick up the pace, see our post on letter names or sounds first, and for the order those sounds should arrive in, our guide to the order to teach letter sounds.

Sweet Phonics is built around this same fast-introduction, heavy-review structure rather than a letter-per-week pace: each lesson introduces one new letter, but the app's review and practice activities keep bringing earlier letters back - including a dedicated activity that specifically contrasts letters like b and d once both are known, which is exactly the kind of spaced, repeated review the research favors over a single long unit per letter.