Hello, my name is Grace, and welcome to alphabetical order. In this video, you'll learn
to place letters and words in alphabetical order so that you can find your way around a dictionary,
a phone listing, books in a bookstore, or for filing your personal musical playlist.
Alphabetical order means that the letters or words are in the order of the 26 letters of
the alphabet — in the same order you sing them in the ABC song. I will teach you how to do that now.
The first thing you need to do is to learn the order of the alphabet. You
can play games like "Name the Next Letter." For example, what is the letter that comes after A?
Yes, B. And you go on playing in this way with a partner. It sometimes helps to sing
the alphabet song to know which comes first or to look at an alphabet chart. Another game you
can play is "What's the Middle Letter?" For example, what is the letter between U and W?
That's right, V, and so on. Yet another game you can play is "What Comes Before?"
What is the letter that comes before Z? If you said Y, then you are right.
Then you can play games like "Put the Letters in Order." Can you put these three letters in order?
Which would come first based on the order it appears in the alphabet? If you said D, you
are correct. Since it is near the beginning of the alphabet, the next letter would be... Yes, L. That
leaves us with T. That is the final letter in this set. These letters are now in alphabetical order.
Once you can alphabetize letters, you can move on to placing words in alphabetical order.
Here are three words that begin with three different letters. Which of these beginning
letters comes first in the alphabet? Yes, B comes before T or P, so "bike" is first alphabetically.
Which of these words comes next? If you said "plane," you are correct because P comes before
T in the alphabet. Remember that you can say the alphabet aloud to be sure. And that leaves us
"train." T comes after P, so it is last in this set. These words are now in alphabetical order.
Alphabetizing words can get a little tricky because sometimes you must
look at more than one letter. Here are three words that begin with B.
How will we put them in alphabetical order when they all begin with the same letter?
When the beginning letters are the same, we need to look at the next letter.
Now let's put them in alphabetical order. Since I comes before the other letters in the alphabet,
we know that "bike" is the first word in this list. Now, which comes first, O or U?
Right, O comes next. That leaves us with "button" because the next letter is U,
and U comes near the end of the alphabet. These words are now in alphabetical order.
If the first and second letters in a word are the same, you look to the third letter
and alphabetize it in the same way. And the same is true if the first,
second, and third letters are the same in all words, and so on.
Alphabetizing can help you organize many things in your life, like a list of your favorite movie
titles or the books on your bookshelf so that they're easy to find when you're looking for them.
There are many online tools to help you sort your list in alphabetical order in one click, but if
you don't have access to these tools, you'd better remember your ABCs. You can practice alphabetizing
letters and words with our fun online games and quizzes. Remember to always be clever.