Capital and Lowercase letters

[jacie87]

How do you approach/explain this? My daughter is turning three very soon, and she is very interested in reading/writing. I'm taking it very slow and letting her set the pace with this but I'm not sure how to explain that A and a are the same letter. The last time I told her that she got very angry about it. Should I just stick with uppercase for now? How did you explain to your children about uppercase and lowercase? Did you teach them together, or did you teach one set of letters and teach the other set later?

[spruce]

Just explain to her that all letters have two types...one lowercase and one uppercase, and we use them differently when we're writing. 

She's been seeing the different forms of letters all through her life, while you've read to her, on grocery signs, on street signs...it's just up to you to reinforce the concept.  :) 

love, p

[Daffodil]

I taught uppercase first, and I remember at some point showing DD a lowercase r and telling her what it was, and she shook her head and insisted it wasn't R.  So I pulled out Dr. Seuss's ABC, and read it to her, pointing out the uppercase and lowercase versions of each letter.  "Big A, little a, what begins with A?"  Maybe if your DD doesn't want to hear you telling her A and a are the same, she'll accept it when Dr. Seuss says it.  (Mine did.)

[CCJWGM]

I taught my DD uppercase first.  When she started noticing that there was little and big letters on her own is when we started working on lower case.  She was probably 4 1/2.  My DS, 3, is starting to show letter interest.  I am doing uppercase only for now with him.

[jake&zaxmom]

At that age, my boys referred to capital letters as the "Mama" and lower case letters were the "baby"  :)

[jacie87]

Thanks for the responses! I'm glad other moms have tried uppercase first and had it work for them. My thought is that uppercase is less confusing because there is more distinction between letters. I think at this age that bdpq etc could be too confusing in lowercase, but I wasn't sure how well that would work out later if I only taught uppercase first. I don't want to upset her about A and a being the same, because right now she is really excited about the uppercase letters and I would hate to spoil her excitement! Maybe I will just try explaining it again when she asks? Surely she will notice at some point when we are reading together :) thanks again. I'll keep teaching uppercase and then come back to lowercase when she is older and can understand more easily.