Of course how I stumbled upon this concept is poetry. The ABCeDarian is actually a very, very old form where every line, or each stanza starts with the first letter of the alphabet, depending on which alphabet is being followed—obviously not always English. There are many examples in ancient Hebrew, and skipping forward to the middle ages, Chaucer, of course wrote his own, “An ABC” which is a translation of a French prayer modified onto an English ABCeDarian.
Fast forward think Dr. Seuss and his ABCs from 1963 where those two yellow dogs meander through the alphabet. For me, the desire to bridge the lofty poetic form with the likes of Dr. Seuss is HUGE.
Poetry begins in sound. The sounds of language. In English there are 44 distinct sounds—phonemes—created by the 26 letters in our alphabet. So with little ones, we begin here. But here’s the thing: please, PLEASE, let’s be more creative than the tired old ABC song!
We are very excited to be releasing a slew of ABCeDarian project for primary students on Print Shop. Right now we have a sneak peak, P is for Pumpkin, up for FREE. And this FREE offering won’t be FREE forever, so download while the offer stands. Come summer, we will be dropping an entire alphabet of projects—our ABCeDarian offering!
And we don’t envision the ABCeDarian theme being limited to little ones. Think sentence writing, word games, poetry and so much more! When it comes to the ABCs the possibilities are limitless.
“My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It’s the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-ma-tuzz. You’ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond Z and start poking around,” so says Dr. Seuss.
~Kimberly