Why the Alphabet Is the Wrong Teaching Order

Alphabetical order is the most common way to teach letter formation and one of the least efficient. The letters a, b and c share no hand movement at all, so a child who starts there learns three unrelated motor plans in three days and none of the first transfers to the second. Group letters by the stroke they have in common and the same twenty minutes of practice buys six letters instead of one.

This is the reason our letters hub is organized in family blocks rather than A to Z.

What a letter family actually is

A family is a set of letters whose opening movement is the same. Not letters that look similar on the page, which is a different and less useful criterion, but letters where the hand does the same thing in the same direction from the same starting position.

Almost the entire lowercase alphabet runs on two starting behaviors. One is a counter-clockwise curve that begins at the upper right, just below the midline, and travels up and left before coming over the top and down. That single movement covers c, o, a, d, g, q and s. The other is a straight downstroke that begins at the top left of the letter, which covers l, i, t, h, b, p, n, m, r, u, k and the diagonals v, w, x, y and z.

Three letters refuse to join anything. e opens with a horizontal bar floating in mid-space, f with a small curve just below the top line, and j with a midline stem that runs on into the descender space. They each need their own lesson rather than being folded into a block where they will only confuse the pattern.

The six lowercase families

Family	Letters	Anchor letter	What the hand repeats
Counter-clockwise curve	c o a d g q s	c	Start upper right, travel up and left, over the top, down
Single downstroke	l i t	l	Top to baseline, straight, no turn
Diagonal stroke	v w x y k z	v	Angled line down, angled line up, both aimed
Downstroke with a retraced arch	n m r h b p	n	Stem down, retrace up the stem, arch out right
Downstroke that turns at the bottom	u j	u	Stem down, curve at the baseline, back up
One-off starting point	e f	none	Nothing reused, teach individually

Teach the anchor first and teach it past the point where it looks finished. Once a child can put the pencil at the upper right and travel counter-clockwise without thinking about it, o is c closed, a is c closed plus a downstroke, and d and g are the same purchase again. The same logic runs through the arch family: n is the investment, and m, r, h, b and p are the return on it.

Capitals map differently

Capitals are not lowercase letters made larger. They start from fewer places, use more straight lines, and sit entirely between two lines with no ascenders or descenders to manage, which is why many sequences introduce them first.

Family	Letters
Straight-line capitals	L F E H T I
Downstroke plus curve	D P B R U J
Counter-clockwise curve	C O G Q S
Downstroke plus diagonal	K M N
Diagonal capitals	A V W X Y Z

Whether capitals or lowercase should come first is genuinely contested and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The motor argument favors capitals because the forms are simpler. The literacy argument favors lowercase because lowercase is what connected text is actually made of, and a child who writes MOM in block capitals is not yet writing the way books are printed. Pick one and be consistent; do not alternate.

What the evidence supports, and what it does not

The honest position is that sequencing by movement is a well-reasoned convention rather than a proven intervention.

What does have research behind it is that handwriting instruction should be explicit and should aim at automaticity rather than legibility alone. The What Works Clearinghouse practice guide Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers (2012, revised 2018) rates “teach students to become fluent with handwriting, spelling, sentence construction, typing, and word processing” at moderate evidence, its highest rating in that guide. A meta-analysis of handwriting fluency research from 2000 to 2020 by López-Escribano, Martín-Babarro and Pérez-López found that programs targeting legibility without also training fluency failed to improve writing speed, and that multicomponent programs produced moderate effects. That review does not adjudicate teaching order at all, which tells you something about how thin that particular literature is.

Be cautious with prewriting research too. A 2025 pilot randomized trial in the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal taught seven prewriting patterns to 18 four and five year olds and found that the intervention group did not significantly outperform a waitlist control. That is a small pilot and underpowered by the authors’ own framing, but it is a useful corrective against confident claims that any particular stroke program produces measurable gains.

Commercial programs converge on the same structural idea even where they disagree on everything else. Zaner-Bloser(R) reduces manuscript to what it calls four simple strokes and a set of legibility keys. D’Nealian(R) and Handwriting Without Tears(R) each use their own groupings and their own letterforms. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reselling any of those programs; our own styles are described functionally as traditional print, modern slant print, simplified block print and continuous cursive. The point is only that no mainstream program teaches in alphabetical order, and that convergence is worth noticing even though it is not evidence in the experimental sense. For a fuller comparison see our styles article.

What to do about it

Check the prerequisite strokes before you check the letters. If a child cannot copy a plus sign or a diagonal from a printed model, letter sheets will teach workarounds rather than letters. Pre-writing strokes covers what to look for and in what order those forms arrive.

Run one family per block, not one letter per day. A block might be four sessions on the curve family: c alone, then c and o, then a and d, then g and q mixed in. The repetition that matters is repetition of the movement, not repetition of the letter.

Say the movement out loud while the child writes. “Start at the top right, curve up and around, keep going down.” Verbal cueing costs nothing and makes the pattern explicit rather than something the child has to infer from a dotted outline.

Separate b and d in time. They sit in the same family here, but introducing them in the same week is the single most reliable way to manufacture a reversal habit. Teach b inside the arch block, then leave several weeks before d. b and d reversals covers why the confusion happens and when it stops being ordinary.

Interleave after the block, not during it. Blocked practice builds the pattern; mixed practice is what makes it stick and what tells you whether the child actually owns it. Once a family is solid, generate a sheet that mixes letters from two or three families and see what falls apart.

Do not judge a worksheet by repetition count. Starting dots, direction arrows and numbered strokes do more for formation than a row of forty tracing outlines. Our worksheet generator lets you set the text, so you can build a family block directly rather than accepting whatever alphabet page a printable happens to offer.

When alphabetical order is the right call

Two exceptions are real. A child learning to write their own name works in whatever order the name demands, and that is correct, because the motivation is worth more than the motor efficiency; see teaching a child to write their name. And if a reading program is introducing letter sounds in a fixed order, there is a genuine tension between the phonics sequence and the motor sequence.

You do not have to resolve that tension by forcing them to match. Letter-sound knowledge and letter formation are separate skills learned through separate channels, and a child can be reading a letter for weeks before formally learning to write it. Let the reading program set its own order and let handwriting practice follow the movement families. For how the two fit together across a term, see how to teach handwriting.