Consider this fair warning at the beginning of this post - I'm going on a tear about something that 99% of the population could probably give a flying fig about, continue reading at your own risk ;-)
As I've mentioned recently, Noah is showing a lot of interest in figuring out what letters words begin with and is constantly asking me how to spell things. I can tell he's getting ready to start the process of learning how to read. And they've been doing a lot of work with handwriting at school and I've noticed a considerable improvement in his writing skills lately. To encourage him along those lines I wanted to put a book together for him. The idea was to have each letter have it's own page. I was going to trace an uppercase and lower case version of each letter on the front piece of a paper, and then he'd be able to trace around the letter and then on that side also cut out pictures from magazines of things that start with that letter and then glue them to it. On the back side, I made a trip to a local teacher's store last weekend and found a really cool handwriting workbook. It was on that great lined paper and had step by step version of each letter in the uppercase and lower case form. I tore apart the actual workbook and put the pages on the back of each letter page, then. Voila, Noah's own ABC book!
So while that's still in progress it got me thinking about my kindergarten days. While I know not everyone learned this way, one of my fondest school memories is learning with the Letter People in kindergarten and listening to the Letter People songs on tape at home. I bet we listened to that tape until it pretty much fell apart. To this day without missing a beat I can probably sing you the words to each letter's corresponding song. It's a wonder my parents didn't go absolutely batty listening to that silly tape.
Which made me think 'gee, I wonder if I could get it on CD for Noah.' Google to the rescue!
And then I learned the most horrifying shocking and upsetting piece of news in a very long time - they messed with my Letter People! Some 'wise' person somewhere decided that in order to be politically correct, they should have 13 female characters and 13 male characters. In the past, all the vowels were "Ms" and all the consonants "Mr." Nope, not any more.
Mom - there is no more Mr. F. It is now Ms. F. And they changed the song.
Did you read that right, everyone, they changed the Letter People! Who does that?? I'm not sure I'm going to be able to sleep tonight after this revelation. I have a feeling a trip to Fremont soon to try to find that tape is going to be in order. I'm hoping my techie whiz husband will have an idea on how to salvage it if we can find it.
Off to mourn here in Farmington. Until tomorrow...
Yikes! No more "Feet the flip, feet that flop, flippin' floppin', never stoppin', Mr. F, that is I?" Weren't things better before? What about Super Socks? Losing that would be the worst!!??!!!
ReplyDeleteIt is still thankfully Mr. S. But like I told Grant Misses are not supposed to have funny feet! I think this is way more likely to scar every little girl out there than the vowels being girls! It was so easy to remember that way. (OK, so 24 hours later I am still obviously more than a little bitter...)
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