Letterland

Letterland is a synthetic phonics approach for teaching reading, writing and spelling to 3-8 year-olds. The Letterland characters transform plain black letter shapes into child-friendly pictograms and they all live in an imaginary place called Letterland. Simple stories about the Letterland characters, explain the full range of dry phonics facts so that children are motivated to listen, to think and to learn. These stories explain alphabet shapes, all 44 sounds of the English language, and many common spelling patterns.
History
Letterland was originally created and developed in the UK by Lyn Wendon in 1968, as a way to help children who were struggling with learning to read and had fallen behind their peers. It was first published as a reading and writing programme in 1985, and has been in use by teachers, parents and children ever since. The programme has been developed and extended to include a wide range of products for use in school, at home and with children learning English. It is used in both mainstream classrooms and as a catch-up approach for children who need extra help. Letterland is now used in over 100 countries around the world. The Department for Education in England included it on their approved list of programmes for teaching synthetic phonics in English schools.
The programme
The Letterland system covers all 44 sounds in the English language and their major recurring spelling patterns. It uses multi-sensory learning (stories, songs, rhymes, role play, actions and activities) to teach three basic skills simultaneously: letter sounds; letter shapes and word building, then builds on these skills to progress children on to more advanced reading and spelling.
Listening and Speaking: The programme focuses on the importance of speaking and listening as the foundation for literacy skills. It introduces an imaginary world where the ‘Letterlanders’ live, and a story logic for phonic facts.
Letter sounds: The names of Letterland characters correspond to the Aa-Zz letter sounds. Children are taught each pictogram, then the plain letter shape immediately afterwards, in order to emphasise and reinforce the association between the two. As they progress, children learn the sounds that two or more letters make when they are blended together, and the different ways that the same letter can sound in different words or with different letter pairings (e.g. the short ‘i’ sound in ‘ink’ and ‘hill’ vs. the long ‘i’ sound in ‘ice’ or ‘island’) . A full list of Letterland characters and their sounds can be found on the Letterland website.
Letter shapes: Simple rhymes about Letterland characters emphasise correct letter formation and well as writing direction, and help to avoid confusion over similar-looking letters e.g. ‘b’, ‘d’ and ‘p’; ‘m’ and ‘n’. The way that a character’s image is embedded within its uppercase and lowercase letter shape also helps to reinforce letter direction and formation.
Word building: The skills of blending (combining two or more letter sounds) and segmenting (separating words into their individual letter sounds) are introduced early on in Letterland. Blending and segmenting starts with simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. The programme introduces ‘tricky’ words (high-frequency words with irregular spellings such as ‘said’, ‘they’, what’). It covers words with adjacent consonants, digraphs (two-letter blends such as ‘gh’ ‘sh’, ‘ch’, ‘er’) and trigraphs (three-letter blends such as ‘igh’, ‘ing’, ‘ear’). Throughout the programme there are opportunities to formally or informally assess child’s literacy progress.
Product ranges
Letterland publishes a range of complementary resources, for use in the classroom, by parents at home or overseas to teach children English.
At school: Letterland publishes a Teacher’s Guide and supporting resources for England and the UK. Resources include letter cards, magnetic word builders, picture books, phonics readers, apps and software to cover the essential literacy skills from early years (ages 3-5) to lower primary (ages 5-7). It also includes an advanced teaching level to provide more challenge for 5-8 year-olds.
The USA edition, Step-by-Step, has Teacher’s Guides for K-G2, with supporting resources including decodable stories, a spelling program and intervention guidelines for children who need more support.

At home: Letterland’s At Home resources are designed to be used alongside the programme if a child is using it in school, or as a stand-alone way for parents to help support their children’s literacy learning. Resources include picture books, activity books, card games, sticker books, eBooks and software, as well as online downloadable activities.
Teaching English: Letterland’s EAL programme (Fix-it Phonics) has four structured levels to help children master all the English letter shapes and sounds, reading, writing and communication skills. Each level contains interactive software, including animated Letterland characters demonstrating correct pronunciation of letter sounds and words.
Annual Event
In 2006 Tweetsie Railroad in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, took up the suggestion from a local literacy advisor to turn their theme park into Letterland for a day. Children could visit as a reward for working hard at learning to read, and to celebrate their progress with Letterland during the school year. This one-off educational celebration was so successful that it has been repeated annually.
In May 2015 the event was extended over six days to enable Kindergarten, first and second graders from all surrounding schools who wanted to attend to do so. Other areas, such as Wake County NC, have followed suit in recent years, creating their own local Letterland Day celebrations.
Research
Research validation of Letterland’s approach includes a six-month project by Dr. Dennis Molfese, Editor-in-Chief of Developmental Neuropsychology and Chair and Professor of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA. In the summer and fall terms of 2004 he pre- and post-tested sixty three and four year-olds in a Kentucky school for brain activity while learning the alphabet with Letterland, compared with a similar group using a conventional phonic approach to a-z. He found that the brainwave activity of the control group was limited to the left side in the area that normally processes speech and language. By contrast, in the Letterland group, he discovered brainwave activity on both sides of the brain. He correlated this activity with the higher literacy performance of the Letterland group. A further result also emerged from the second testing: higher retention of the Letterland group’s alphabet learning across the long summer break.

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