Children's Alphabets with Pictures

When we started teaching our son the Bulgarian Cyrillic Alphabet, we initially used plastic letters from an English alphabet. We taught him the Bulgarian reading of the symbols, e.g. "P" is read in Bulgarian as "R", "Y" is "U", "X" is "H", etc. The letters that were not in the English alphabet we would write down. It was a bit of a strain to memorize abstract symbols by writing them and English and Bulgarian reading at the same time, so I searched for a printable children's Cyrillic alphabet with pictures on the net. I did not find anything that I liked so I decided to make my own. Some of the images are probably strange picks, like the beer instead of a banana, but that was my son's preference - "I don't like bananas. Daddy's beer is better for a "Б"". I am putting here an editable SVG file, so that any image can be easily changed if your child does not share my son's enthusiasm for daddy's beer. I used Inkscape, which is an excellent piece of free software, to create the alphabets and I definitely would recommend it, if you would like to edit the files. With this picture alphabet my son learned his letters in less than a week. With the English alphabet we may still struggle for some time as we write [A], read [ei], and in the word "apple" [ˈæpəl] it is another pronunciation again. With the Japanese alphabets it may be simpler, as they are just like in Bulgarian - what you write, that's what you read. When I have more time, I may sit down and put a picture hiragana and katakana alphabets, but on the other hand, it so much easier to just go to the shop and buy them.

(Bulgarian) Cyrillic Alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet below is the one used in Bulgaria. The Cyrillic alphabet used in other countries - Macedonia, Serbia, Russia, Mongolia - is only slightly different. I hope you find it useful.

Cyrillic alphabet - (PDF) (SVG) (JPG)

<Copyright >

As the author of the above Cyrillic alphabet with pictures, I place the work in the public domain.

All the images that I used were in the public domain and are available for anyone at www.openclipart.org, except for the following:

• needle image, which was drawn by me;
• bottle of iodine image, which I modified from an original bottle image on www.openclipart.org;
• ostrich, which I traced from a free to use bitmap image at about.com;
• corner - composition made by me from pictures available at www.openclipart.org.

(English) Latin Alphabet

The quick learning results with the Cyrillic alphabet, prompted me to make an English one as well. Here it is.

English alphabet -(PDF) (SVG) (JPG)

<Copyright>

As the author of the above English alphabet with pictures, I place the work in the public domain.

All the images that I used were in the public domain and are available for anyone at www.openclipart.org, except for the following:

• snake and yolk images, which were drawn by me;
• zebra image, which I traced from a free to use bitmap image on Wikipedia.

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