Margo
print awareness — words carry meaning and we read them left to right
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Margo was an inchworm who lived on the pages of picture books. She had discovered something wonderful: the little marks on a page weren't just squiggles — they were words, and words meant something. And you read them by inching along, one way.
Margo climbed to the top of a page. "We start HERE," she said, at the very first word on the left. Then she inched to the right, word by word, all the way to the edge. Left to right — that's the way the words go.
A curious ant thought you could read a book any-which-way. "Not quite," Margo said kindly. "Start at the left, go to the right. Then drop down to the next line and do it again." She inched to show him — line by line, top to bottom. The ant followed, and suddenly the page made sense.
Margo pointed out something big. "Each word is made of letters, all in a row. And each word says something." She inched under a word. "This one says cat — and look, there's a cat in the picture!" The marks and the meaning went together. Print carried a message.
By the end of the book, Margo and the ant had followed every line — left to right, top to bottom — all the way to The End.
Margo stretched, warm and proud. The page wasn't a mystery of squiggles anymore. It was full of words, and words were full of meaning — and she knew exactly how to follow them.
The LetterTots ensemble
Margo 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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Kea
Letter-NAME knowledge (hero) — a parrot who says the name of each printed letter ('that's a B'); naming printed letters IS the #1 early reading predictor
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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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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
