Common
The Letter People
Children's literacy program
The Letter People
The Letter People is an American children’s literacy program built around 26 anthropomorphic characters that represent the letters of the alphabet. Conceived in the mid-1960s by teachers Elayne Reiss-Weimann and Rita Friedman, the classroom materials were commercialized by New Dimensions in Education, Inc. beginning in 1968 and adopted in thousands of schools. The program’s early offerings, including Alpha One (grades 1–2) and Alpha Time (kindergarten), used stories, songs, filmstrips, and inflatable “Huggables” to teach letter–sound correspondence and early reading skills. The Alpha Time program later expanded to television with a 60-episode, 15-minute series produced at KETC in St. Louis, which premiered on March 13, 1974 and later aired widely on public-television and educational stations. The original program and show drew attention for their gendered cast (consonants as “Mister,” vowels as “Miss”), which prompted debate and subsequent content adjustments in the 1970s. Ownership changed...
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