All 28 letters, four shapes each
Arabic · Key Stage 1 · The School
The full family
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters: ا ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ك ل م ن ه و ي. Say them in groups of four, clapping the rhythm. Some sounds exist in English (b, t, s, m); some are new friends your mouth will learn — like ع (ʿayn), a deep throat sound, and ق (qāf), a "k" made far back in the mouth.
Four costumes
Most letters wear up to four costumes: alone, at the start, in the middle, and at the end of a word. ع looks like ع alone, عـ at the start, ـعـ in the middle, and ـع at the end. The costume changes but the letter is the same person. Six letters — ا د ذ ر ز و — are "one-way" letters: they connect to the letter before them but never to the letter after.
Two-letter joins
Join بـ + ـت and you get بت. Join لـ + ـم and you get لم. Practise reading joins from right to left: find the first letter on the right, say its sound, then slide to the next. Reading Arabic is exactly this sliding, done smoothly.
Take ع. ALONE: ع. START of a word: عـ as in عَين. MIDDLE: ـعـ as in سَعيد. END: ـع as in رَبيع. Four shapes, and they are all recognisably the same letter with the joining tails added or removed. Now do the same for ه, which changes most of all — and notice that the six non-joiners have only two shapes, not four.