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"The Birth of the Letter
People "In 1964, in a
temporary classroom set up at the end of a school hallway in
Nanuet, New York, a first-grade teacher struggled daily to
focus the attention of her 24 students. The school was
over-crowded; the children were typical first graders, eager
and rambunctious; and the hallway classroom was full of
distractions for them--not ideal conditions for
teaching children to master reading, writing, and social
development. But the teacher, Elayne Reiss, was determined, and
working in collaboration with an early childhood coordinator,
Rita Friedman, created a program that more than focused
the children's attention; it made them eager, involved
learners--in spite of the classroom circumstances. "The
program developed by the two reading specialists revolved around
26 anthropomorphic characters who represented the letters of
the alphabet. Each character had a distinguishing feature that
served as a mnemonic device to help children remember the most
typical sound represented by that letter. The characters
were painted on large, two-dimensional portrait cards. Each
character was given an engaging personality to help the teacher
bring her or him alive in the classroom, and each character
had a song to help children recall the distinguishing feature and
sound. And so the Letter People were born. "The children
responded immediately to the Letter People. The improvised
classroom came to life. Learning became fun, and with more
focused time on task, children learned more quickly and retained
what they learned. As the children shared stories about the
Letter People at home, parents became more involved in their
children's learning. Parents, children, and teachers worked
together to suggest the special characteristic of each Letter
Person to be communicated on the portrait cards. Although the
original Letter People were a non-ethnic-specific community,
they were not balanced in terms of gender. In those early
days, 21 Letter People "boys" represented consonants and five
Letter People "girls" represented vowels-- however, the
children soon learned that there could be no word without a
Letter Person "girl." "From the beginning, the children
viewed the Letter People not merely as letters of the
alphabet, a phonics device, or toys, but as real people. On one
occasion, when the Letter People had to be shipped to
another school, the children insisted that holes be placed in
the boxes so that the Letter People could "breathe" as they
traveled.
"In 1969, the
Letter People found homes in classrooms throughout the United
States when a publisher, New Dimensions in Education, Inc.,
introduced a first-grade Letter People program called
ALPHA ONE.® In 1974, New Dimensions followed the
first-grade program with a Letter People kindergarten program,
ALPHA TIME.® In this program, the Letter People
were transformed from twodimensional figures on portrait
cards to three-dimensional, age-appropriate, inflatable, vinyl
figures called Huggables.®
" The New
Generation of Letter People ABRAMS &
COMPANY acquired the educational publishing rights to the Letter
People in 1990. Recognizing the uniqueness of the Letter
People as motivational and educational tools, the Company set
about immediately to build around them a completely new series
of Letter People programs --programs that incorporate
findings from the most respected and replicable research on
the ways in which children develop socially and intellectually
and on how they learn and acquire literacy skills. Although
the Letter People have always lived in the imagination of
children, they acquired a real place to
live in the kindergarten program, Land of the
Letter People,®
which was published in
1996. The kindergarten program was followed by a new
first-grade program, Lives of the Letter People,® in 1999. The original Letter People portrait cards were
replaced in first grade by engaging Word Workers®, free-standing, plastic figures. Also in 1999, the
program Let's Begin
with the Letter People® brought the
Letter People into the prekindergarten classroom for the first
time. "The Letter People continue to be a nonethnic- specific
community of characters belonging to all children, but in the
new generation, they have attained gender equality--with 13
females and 13 males. The concept of distinguishing vowels
and consonants is no longer gender-related. Instead, vowels
are identified as LetterLights® who light
the way to making words..."
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