Allow students to explore letters and sounds. Provide simple hands-on toys for your students to explore such as alphabet blocks, magnetic letters and books to expose students to letters and words from an early age.
Introduce the connection between written letters and letter names. Sing alphabet songs with your class and show students a picture of each letter as they sing. Talk to students about how each letter has an upper case and lower case and play matching activities, such as bingo or memory, with both sets of letters.
Discuss how each letter represents a sound. Show children a letter and have them stand up if their name begins with the letter you have selected. Model writing for students, and comment on sounds you hear, such as, "I hear a D sound at the beginning of dog, and I know that sound means I should write the letter D."
Select letters to teach explicitly to your preschool students. Teach letters to students one at a time. The Reading Rockets website suggests introducing letters with simple sounds, such as F, M and S, and those that are used frequently, like A, H and T first. Explain to students that each letter makes a certain sound, or sounds, and complete simple activities for each letter and sound that you introduce, such as finding items in the classroom that begin with the letter or making a list of words that start with the letter's sound.
Work at your students' speed. While many preschools choose a letter of the week, many children are able to learn several sounds per week, so long as similar sounds, such as B and V, and similar looking letters, such as G and Q, are taught separately from each other. For preschoolers who are comfortable with simple letter and sound relationships, consider introducing the sounds of consonant blends, such as BL and GR, and digraphs like CH and TH.
Reinforce your students' phonics skills. Add the letters and sounds that your students have learned into classroom activities. Review skills by having students match picture cards with the letters they begin or end with, making the letter sound when shown a written letter or through other simple classroom games and activities.