Kea
letter names — every printed letter has a name you can say
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Kea was a green parrot who loved letters. Not the sounds yet — the names. To Kea, each printed letter was a little friend with a name, and saying its name felt like saying hello. "That's a B," Kea would say, tapping it. "Hello, B!"
Kea flew past a big red sign. "S!" Kea called. "That's an S, curvy like a snake." Kea didn't have to sound it out. Kea just knew its name, quick and sure, the way you know a friend's name across the playground.
A shy little finch pointed at a letter and whispered, "What's that one?" "That's an M," Kea said warmly. "Two little mountains — M." The finch tried it: "M." "Yes! Now you know its name too." One more letter-friend, learned.
Kea and the finch went name-spotting all day. "T!" "O!" "A!" Every letter they passed, they greeted by name. The more names they knew, the more the world seemed to say hello back — on signs, on boxes, on the sides of books.
At sunset Kea and the finch perched together and named their favorite letters one more time — B, S, M, T. Each one felt like a friend now, not a stranger.
Kea fluffed up, warm and proud. Knowing a letter's name was the very first hello. And Kea had a whole sky full of letter-friends to say hello to tomorrow.
The LetterTots ensemble
Kea is part of LetterTots's distributed-narrative cast. Each character embodies a different curricular primitive; together they teach the full subject.
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Sono
Letter-SOUND knowledge — a songbird who sings the sound each letter makes (/b/… /s/…); producing the letter's sound IS letter-sound knowledge
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Margo
Print awareness — an inchworm who follows the page left-to-right, word by word; tracking print IS knowing print carries meaning
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Serif
Letter-shape discrimination — a mouse who matches same-shaped letters and tells look-alikes apart (b vs d); discriminating forms IS visual letter knowledge
