Looking for Teachers Who Remember the Original 1968–1996 Letter People Program: Lessons For Early Literacy Today
Last month, I was volunteering in my 5-year-old’s kindergarten classroom, wiping down cracker crumbs off tables with a soapy sponge, a coffee stain blotted on my volunteer shirt, when I spotted it tucked on a top shelf behind the foam alphabet puzzle: a frayed fuzzy blue Mr. M, one googly eye hanging by a thread, the signature munchy mouth still stitched crooked on the front. I dropped the sponge. My son’s teacher, Ms. Lopez, looked up from grading morning entry tickets. “You know that thing?” she said. “It was my mom’s. She taught first grade back in the 70s. I don’t remember much about the program, just that she swore by it. The kids crowd around it every time I pull it down, I just don’t get why it works better than the new sound cards we got last year.”
I grew up in the 80s, and my first grade teacher used the original program from start to finish. I struggled with dyslexia back then, couldn’t keep b and d straight to save my life, no matter how many worksheets I filled out. It wasn’t until we got to Mr. D, with his dribbling foot, that it clicked. Every time we said the /d/ sound, we’d stomp our foot on the floor like we were dribbling a basketball. I still catch myself doing that sometimes now, when I’m skimming a road sign and mix up letters. That silly little hook stuck.
When my son started mixing up b and d a few months ago, I tried all the tricks the school sent home: the “bed trick” where you make your hands into b and d, the cue that “b comes before d in bed.” It didn’t stick. He still wrote every d as a b half the time, and got frustrated when I corrected him. I pulled up photos of the original Letter People online, pointed to Mr. B’s big button belly and Mr. D’s dribbling foot, sang him the 2-line silly song my teacher taught me. Ten minutes later, he could pick the right letter out of a line-up every time. It wasn’t magic. It was just a hook that worked for his brain.
That’s when I started looking for teachers who used the original program between 1968 and 1996. Most of the stuff you find online now is the rebooted version from the 2000s, which is more generic, less silly, and lost a lot of the original sensory, play-based bits. The teachers who used the first version are retiring or already retired, and a lot of their little, tested, on-the-job tricks are going with them. I posted in our local retired educators Facebook group, and got a dozen replies already, but I’m still looking for more.
What I’ve learned so far from the teachers I’ve talked to is that the original Letter People wasn’t just a set of plush toys and cheesy songs. It was built around the simple idea that little kids don’t learn abstract letter sounds by memorizing them on a page. They learn by linking the sound to a story, a movement, a silly trait that sticks. A lot of the early literacy curricula we use now push rote memorization and quick mastery, because schools have to hit testing benchmarks by the end of first grade. So we cut 10 minutes of silly songs and puppet play to make room for more worksheet practice. But what I’m seeing, both with my son and in his classroom, is that cutting that play leads to more kids struggling to anchor sounds in their memory, which leads to them getting flagged as behind earlier than they need to be.
You don’t need an original 1970s Mr. M plush to use this idea, and you don’t need to rewrite your kid’s entire curriculum to make it work. The simplest thing any parent or teacher can do, that I’ve picked up from the teachers I’ve interviewed, is this: For any letter your kid is struggling to remember or mixes up with another, help them make up a silly character with a trait that starts with the letter’s sound, then add a simple movement. If they struggle with p and q, make Mr. P a pizza-eater with a big round pizza belly that sticks out to the left, and have them pretend to take a bite of pizza when they say /p/. Make Ms. Q a queen with a curly puffy ponytail that sticks out to the right, and have them wave like a queen when they say /q/. It takes two minutes per letter, and kids remember the trait way better than they remember a worksheet drill.
One retired teacher I talked to, Mrs. Henderson, who taught first grade for 32 years with the original Letter People, told me she never had a kid who didn’t master all their letter sounds by the end of the year, and she spent half her literacy time playing Letter People charades. “Kids don’t care if it’s aligned to some new set of standards,” she said over the phone last week. “They care if it’s fun enough to remember. That’s all I ever did.” She mailed me a tattered copy of her original songbook last week, and the pages are covered in her handwritten notes in the margins: “Add a jump for Jumping Jack J,” “Kids love to make the munchy mouth for Mr. M, give them a cracker to munch while they practice.”
Last week, Ms. Lopez started doing five minutes of Letter People charades every morning with her class. She pulled that old Mr. M off the top shelf, and the kids take turns being their favorite Letter Person while the rest guess the letter sound. She told me yesterday that the number of kids mixing up b and d has dropped by half in three weeks. I’m still sorting through old photocopies of lesson plans and handwritten notes from the retired teachers who’ve reached out, and I’m still looking for more people who have stories or small tricks to share. I don’t think we need to bring the whole original program back word for word. But I do think we lost something simple and effective when we stopped letting kids learn their letters through silly, moving, memorable stories. Right now, this little experiment is working. We’ll see where it goes.
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