New, electronic and battery-operated toys with alphabet software, fun graphics and quirky music can be genuinely intimidating to parents who rightly approach them with caution. They may use the "hot" education words: self-correcting, interactive or learning-level-scaled. Parents notice, however, that sometimes interaction is nothing more than pushing a button. It is not always clear if a child will recognize the letter "g" when unaccompanied by the cartoon giraffe and ear-bending jingle. Birthdays and holidays are great times for gifts of toys like these, but good parents know to worry more about getting their children's batteries going rather than the toy batteries.
Look at the variety of ABC-related toys that operate on kid- and adult-power to make learning truly interactive. Alphabet puzzles, building blocks and card games are only the beginning of ABC toys that stimulate looking, manipulating, building, talking and listening. All of these skills lead down the path to eventual reading. Watching a parent sound out the letter "g" and then go through all the puzzle pieces looking for the "g-g-g-gorilla--gotcha!" sinks in to a child's mind as no screen-generated image can. Use blocks to spell out the names of everyone in the family. Start your grocery list in magnetic letters on the refrigerator, and dictate what you need to put on the list.
It is hard to list places that don't contribute to teaching the ABCs in the right hands. By the time "milk" has gone up on the refrigerator in magnetic letters, been copied or traced onto paper and then found in the grocery store, a great deal of learning has gone on. Clue children in that many grocery stores use the alphabet to display canned soup, vegetables and fruits, and watch them hunt with success. Cruise one aisle long enough to find out how many food items begin with the letter "c." As your child becomes more sensitive to letter-recognition, the service station, post office and passing traffic add many more opportunities to read together. You will find children incorporating small words into letter-recognition (gas, stop, go, dog, fire) and talking about how letter-changes mean new sounds and new words.
Parents play critical roles in all the language development that surrounds and supports learning the ABCs, and there is no good substitute for what a loving parent or caretaker can do. Knowing the child best, you can use toys, objects or activities that particularly engage your child in learning. Some kinds of communicating with your child and vice versa are possibly wired-in. Parents are understandably conflicted about "educational" television programs; they do provide language and learning experiences. Those have, however, been generalized for large numbers of children and are mostly watched. Baking cookies, walking the dog, brushing teeth, racing toy cars and even cleaning the yard provide specific and memorable language experiences for your child. You don't need to be a teacher to be an educator.