What is Letterland?
Letterland is the secret place where letters live!
Letterland is the most child-friendly, multisensory way of teaching children how to read and write. The secret of its worldwide success lies in its information-rich pictogram characters and phonic stories, its explicit, systematic teaching, and its ability to delight children aged 3-8+.
How does it work?
Letterland gives children special strategies.
The child's strategy is: START to say the Letterlander character's name, then STOP after the first sound!
Sounds
To learn to read and write, children need to know the sound that letters represent in words. Traditional letter names like 'aee, bee, cee' don't help because over half of them begin with another letter's sound (e.g. eff, aitch, em are, you). By contrast, each Letterlander's name always begins with it's usual sound. So it's brilliantly simple.
Shapes
The Letterlander characters and their engaging story explanations provide visual and verbal metaphors for letter shape, direction and formation, including reasons why capital and lower case letters have different shapes.
Harry Hat Man's Handwriting Song
Hurry from the Hat Man's head down to his heel on the ground. Go up and bend his knee over so he'll hop while he makes his sound.
Clever clues help prevent problems with letter reversals and confusions between similar looking letters like b/d, p/q, s/z, n/u, m/w etc.
Digraph Strategies
Short phonic fables about the characters' interactions give logical reasons for all essential spelling patterns. The reasons become the child's recall routes.
Sammy snake loves to hiss ('sss'),
but the Hat Man hates noise,
so he hushes Sammy with a 'sh' sound!
Multisensory Learning
Letterland activates every learning channel, linking all the things that children love - music, movement, art, craft, drama, rhyme, social interaction - directly with letter knowledge.
Actions for a-z are linked ideationally to each letter character, forging a strong connection between the action, letter shapes and sound.
Literacy Skills
Letterland characters have personalities, friends and homes, providing a realistic bridge between abstract print and the real world. This creates a secure learning environment for children to develop all the cognitive, language and literacy skills they need, within a systematic and motivating framework.
- Multisensory learning strategies
- Phonemic awareness & alliteration
- Phonics
- Letter formation
- Segmenting and blending
- Word & sentence building
- Vocabulary & language
- Imagination & creative writing
LETTERLAND ® is a registered trademark of Lyn Wendon Letterland International Ltd, Barton, Cambridge CB3 7AY, UK. www.letterland.com
Education & Development
