The German alphabet consists of 26 letters. There is no clear one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters, meaning that a letter can represent multiple sounds. Additionally, there are various letter combinations that represent specific sounds, such as "sch," "ch," and "st." For our elementary school children, it is particularly important to understand that there is an alphabet and that these letters form a fixed sequence, similar to the sequence of natural numbers. This order helps in organizing words into lists and easily finding them again, without having to read through an entire, potentially very long, list of words when searching for a specific one. Knowing the alphabet in the correct order is therefore very useful when looking for words in indexes, working with dictionaries or field guides, or searching for names in phone books.