The proposed signs are an effective way of teaching reading skills by the whole word method. However, that is not necessarily the best way to teach reading. Many educators justifiably prefer the phonetic method. Those who want to use methods other than those presented here are to be encouraged.

Those who do choose to prepare signs should be aware of several guidelines: Many parents have a tendency to write the letters of the sign in capital letters. Perhaps they do this because children are typically shown uppercase letters when they are taught the alphabet.

However, that is not an effective way of teaching the words, just as it is not an effective way of teaching the alphabet.

Keep in mind that you can convert upper-case to lower-case letters with no effort and without even thinking. Your child does not yet know the upper case and lower case letters, and he cannot make that conversion.

Now, think about any text that you read. How often do you come across text that is written in all capital letters? Not too often, right? Capitals only appear in certain headlines or titles - and even then upper and lower case are used very often.

For this reason, it is strongly recommended that you refrain from the natural tendency to use capital letters. As a matter of fact, don't even put a capital letter at the beginning of the words.

Furthermore, your child does not identify the individual letters when he uses this whole word method. He learns the shape of the word and then he associates it with the word that you teach him. He does not learn individual letters. Thus, if he could associate certain upper case letters with their corresponding lower case letters, he would have difficulty reading the word when it is presented in upper case letters or in any other way that is different from your signs.

Do be consistent with the shapes of the letters. Any letter can be created in many different ways. The way that you create letters in one sign should be identical to the way that it is created in every other sign.

Try to use the simplest letter form possible. Any fancy letter will be distracting and confusing to your child.