The Letter People
Elayne Reiss-Weimann and Rita Friedman, two teachers from George Miller Elementary in Nanuet, New York, created the concept of Letter People.
She had struggled daily to draw the attention of her 24 students (who were typical first-graders, eager and rambunctious) in a distraction-fond hallway classroom at the overcrowded school.
Weimann collaborated with an early childhood coordinator, Rita Friedman, to create an educational program that revolved around 26 anthropomorphic characters, each representing a letter of the alphabet, to teach beginning readers how to "decode" or "sound out" the consonants and vowels that form words.
Both program's basic concept was simple: Each letter of the English alphabet was represented by a unique character with traits derived from itself.
[6] Educators who adopted the program were trained in its implementation, and The Letter People was soon picked up by over 37,000[7] schools across the US.Alpha One, also known as Alpha One: Breaking the Code, was a first and second grade program introduced in 1968, and revised in 1974,[8] that was designed to teach children to read and write sentences containing words containing three syllables in length and to develop within the child a sense of his own success and fun in learning to read by using the Letter People characters.
[9] Alpha One's game-like approach capitalized upon the child's sense of fun and imagination to develop interest in learning to read and spell.
Alan J. Pratt, Ph.D., a director and vice-president of NDE, Inc. approached KETC-TV, a PBS affiliate in St. Louis, Missouri, about creating a TV series based on the escapades of the Letter People.
To ensure phonetic and linguistic accuracy in the television production process, Ruth Lerner from NDE served as the Editorial Supervisor.
Other episodes take the Letter People to more exotic (though still featureless) locales such as outer space (eventually, the show would include more standard scenery, like cityscapes, meadows, Miss O's opera house, etc.
A little dog is minding his own business when various figures (including a female figure carrying a bunch of helium balloons) enter the gates of Letter People Land as the song plays: The show continued to air reruns on PBS stations until the Letter People program was revised in late 1996.
Most of the characters' associated characteristics were changed as well, such as all references to "junk food" being swapped for non-food-related characteristics (Mr. D's "delicious donuts" were exchanged for "dazzling dance", for example) and any Letter Person that Abrams deemed as expressing negative images being changed to be more positive (Mr. H's horrible hair became happy hair instead, Mr. R's Ripping Rubberbands became Rainbow Ribbons, and Mr. X was no longer all wrong and became different, albeit still mixed-up).
In 2002, a newer "Read-to-Me" book series was also written, with an eye toward teaching conflict resolution and problem-solving skills, and features a variety of genres including storybook, mystery, biography, poetry, and nonfiction.
[2] Though the program is generally well received by educators, some have criticized its strong focus on phonics at the expense of other literacy-building techniques.
[18] As of September 21, 2020, The Letter People had no more new content made but the franchise continued to be kept alive as a learning unit of the DIG Pre-K program, with the hand puppets, certain educational materials, a CD with the songs, and most of the big books of the Letter People (all only available for purchase as part of the DIG Pre-K program) having been available on Frog Street Enterprises' online store until early 2024.
As of February 1, 2024, Frog Street Press discontinued the DIG Pre-K program, ending the life of the Letter People franchise due to low sales.
As the newly revised program in 1996 utilized the newer version of the characters and town structures, the name of the Letter People's residence still remained the same.
