Not Letterland

Dear Readers.

I recently had the opportunity to be trained in the Letterland curriculum for teaching phonics.  The following is a portion of my report to a school on why I will not recommend the product:

QUOTE:

I am really NOT enthusiastic about Letterland at all. There are some things about it I love (the use of mnemonics) but there are other things I have a very hard time with (the particular choice of mnemonics).  There is a line between what feels creative and inspired and what feels contrived and forced.  I am sorry to say it, but letterland's associations just feel too prickly to me.  The letter M associations especially threw me way over the edge in how it struck me through my combined lenses of linguistics and neural science studies.

In linguistics I see the M as one of the most primal sounds relating to everything motherly and tender in life at it's core.  The sound of "m" is like the vocalization of a baby with her lips wrapped around her mother's nipple nursing.  Hence it is a sound with lips closed. Fascinatingly, "ma" is the common root word in all human languages and it means mother all the way from English to Chinese.  It is the most universal root syllable.

These association then lead me to thinking of one of the most heart wrenching neural science studies I ever read - the soft cloth monkey experiment or monkey love experiment.  Little baby monkeys were separated at birth and raised nursing on wire mesh mechanic mannequin mother monkeys. The study is detailed on this website:

(http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adoption/studies/HarlowMLE.htm)

This is why the metallic metal munching Mike being used as the mnemonic for the letter M absolutely killed me.  I could never bare to present him to my students.  I am way to sensitive to the emotional backdrop to things to be able to ever run with that story in my lessons with my students. And I already write my own stories similar to the general mnemonic framework of letter land constant.  I've been revising and perfecting my stories for years to teach reading, and my own personal record speeds in teaching kids reading keep getting better all the time without much dependents on "whole program" level commercial products.