Kinder Talk: Awesome Letterland

Letterland is a worldwide program to teach early reading skills, handwriting, spelling, and phonics. Letterland resources has been a heaven-sent to our school. Teaching letters and sounds from rudimentary skills progressing to more complex literary skills has been more exciting as it is a powerful tool.

Letterland characters make learning the letters fun and interesting. My students can easily remember the letter forms and sounds with this Letterland's unique approach in introducing the letters. The characters make their sounds and their names start with their sounds as well. My students ultimate favorite is Annie Apple who say a, a, a. Letterland uses stories to introduce basic sounds and digraphs. For instance, "ch" sound. Clever Cat belongs to Harry Hat Man who looks after her and she loves him. But there's only one single problem. As soon as she finds herself next to him in a word, Harry's hairy hat makes her nose tickle. So whenever they come together in a word, all you can hear is her sneeze, 'ch..." The children love to say this sound while doing the action trick. For this sound, the children put and index finger under their noses and pretend to sneeze with a polite ch! Isn't this a smart idea?.

Who would think spelling could be fune engaging? With Live Spelling, every one can join in and engage in our spelling drills. This is done by handing out picture cards to the children and the teacher says a word to spell. The children repeat the word and decide who has the letters needed to build the word.

We are also enjoying our Letterland Living ABC software. It presents animated characters to develop phonemic awareness and language development. It features alphabet songs and handwriting songs to teach children the right strokes and directionality of letter formation without tears. When my son started to learn how to write letters, he was struggling. But then, when I started singing the handwriting song for a particular letter, he started to show an "ah-huh!" expression on his face. It gave him a hint on how to write the letters. For beginners, they can enjoy finger tracing the letters to before they can actually write the letters. To write letter the lower case Dd, the song goes like this...

Dippy Duck

Draw Dippy Duck's back.

Go round her tum.

Go up to her head.

Then down you come!

The songs -alphabet songs and handwriting songs are very catchy. You can find the kids singing all day long:)

Letterland also offers guide books which is useful and offers practical advice on how to help children to learn to read and write. Parents will understand how the program runs by introducing them to phonics and different stages of literacy.

Letterland program has a lot of fun craft ideas and cooking too. Crafts and physical activities enable them to remember the letter formation and sounds even better as it is simply so much fun!

I can keep going on what Letterland can offer and it is endless. I believe that one of the best gifts I can ever give to my students is to impart the love for reading as we journey together to Letterland.