We’re going on a letter hunt!
Today’s workshop made a line for type, the printed type! Armed with stacks of old magazines and newspapers, we raided them all in search of…the alphabet. The English alphabet consists of 26 letters, and not all of them are easy to come by, so lots of hunting and intricate cutting was required to get from A to B, let alone Z!
Each child was allocated a letter group, with the aim of collecting those letters in their many printed forms. The activity is loosely based on the book “Alfabetiere” by Bruno Munari. Munari’s book is filled with funny rhymes and shapes to help children play with the alphabet. We had fun with the discovery of the letters themselves, hunting and cutting them out from within the articles, adverts and promotions where they live.
Here are A, R and S in all shapes and sizes:
To help us understand why it is more difficult it is to find some letters than others, we found a list of the frequency rate at which letters appear. Curiously, the letters B and P are not as common as you might think, and as for J, K, Q, V, X, Z… well you really need to hunt long and hard for them!
| Letter | Frequency |
|---|---|
| A | 8.17% |
| B | 1.49% |
| C | 2.78% |
| D | 4.25% |
| E | 12.70% |
| F | 2.23% |
| G | 2.02% |
| H | 6.09% |
| I | 6.97% |
| J | 0.15% |
| K | 0.77% |
| L | 4.03% |
| M | 2.41% |
| N | 6.75% |
| O | 7.51% |
| P | 1.93% |
| Q | 0.10% |
| R | 5.99% |
| S | 6.33% |
| T | 9.06% |
| U | 2.76% |
| V | 0.98% |
| W | 2.36% |
| X | 0.15% |
| Y | 1.97% |
| Z | 0.07% |
In the end, we finally made a complete alphabet letter board and the results make a visual feast we will keep in the tweetkids library.
Complicated cutting done! A fantastic job by Viola, Matteo, Ludovico, Diana, Viola and Francesca.
tweetkids.net 