Letterboard resources for practitioners and families
How the four main methodologies differ, where the training actually comes from, what separates a lesson that works from one that fills time, and which question types serve which goals.
If you have recently been handed a letterboard and a methodology name, the first problem is not lesson material. It is orientation. Four approaches share most of their premises and differ in ways that matter once you build a session, and the names get used loosely enough that it is easy to think they are one thing under different branding. They are not.
This page is the map. It covers what each methodology is and who developed it, where the training comes from, what makes a lesson worth the motor effort it costs, and how the question types line up against your goals. Every section links onward.
One thing to say at the start. We write lesson content. We do not train anyone in any of these approaches, and every training link here goes to the organization that developed the approach rather than to us.
The four methodologies, and how they differ
All four rest on the same premise: that for many nonspeaking and unreliably speaking people the barrier is motor rather than cognitive, and that the support needed is a letterboard and a trained partner rather than simplified content. They diverge on how a lesson is built and who teaches it.
The Spellers Method
Developed by Dana Johnson. It is its own methodology rather than a variant of a neighbouring one, and its scope is wider than the board: alongside the letterboard work it draws on occupational therapy, developmental optometry, and assistive technology, on the view that motor control, visual processing, and access to a tool all sit between a person and their ability to answer. Its lessons run denser paragraphs, capitalize the target words, define most of them inline, and use a nine-type question set in a fixed order. Spellers Method lessons covers the structure and shows a worked example.
Spelling to Communicate
Developed by Elizabeth Vosseller and taught through I-ASC, the International Association for Spelling as Communication. S2C lessons tend toward shorter paragraphs than the Spellers Method uses, with a spell-only warm-up early and a question progression sized around motor planning. It also ends on creative writing prompts, which the other approaches do not use. The detail is on S2C lessons.
The Rapid Prompting Method
Developed by Soma Mukhopadhyay and taught through HALO. RPM is the most structurally different of the four. Rather than a paragraph followed by questions, content is broken into short teach-and-ask beats, each ending in a question with two written options where one is obviously wrong, so the motor demand stays constant while the thinking gets harder. The lesson structure is on RPM lessons.
Communication 4 Everyone
C4E builds lessons from substantive paragraphs followed by the same four question types in the same order every time: Two Choices, Predictable, Range, Open-Ended. The fixed order is the distinguishing feature, and it buys predictability for a learner who is spending real effort on every letter. We describe C4E by its structure rather than its origin, because we have not been able to verify an official organization behind the name, and we would rather say that than guess. C4E lessons walks through the four types.
Where to get training
Lesson material is the easy half. Running a session is the part that needs a person, and it is not something a document can teach you. Each methodology trains its own practitioners:
- I-ASC runs practitioner and family training in Spelling to Communicate, and maintains a directory of trained practitioners.
- The Spellers organization runs training in the Spellers Method and can point you toward practitioners working in it.
- HALO runs workshops and camps in the Rapid Prompting Method with Soma Mukhopadhyay and HALO-trained providers.
- ASHA and ISAAC are the professional bodies for the wider AAC field, and a useful reference on augmentative and alternative communication generally, whichever approach you work in.
Sending you to those organizations rather than to a course of our own is intentional. We have no training to sell, and no reason to stand between a family and the people who do this work.
What makes a lesson work
Across all four methodologies, the same handful of things separate material a learner engages with from material that fills a session.
- Age respect and reading level are two dials, not one. Subject matter should be something a peer would study. Sentence complexity and vocabulary should track the learner. Collapsing those into one setting is how a teenager ends up reading about farm animals.
- The topic has to be worth the effort. Every answer is spelled letter by letter. A learner who cares about the subject is buying something with that effort.
- Target words should sit in the prose naturally. Words bolted on so they can be spelled later read as exactly that, and the paragraph stops teaching.
- Question types should vary. Twenty questions of one shape is a motor drill. Varying the demand is what makes it a lesson.
- Open on something completable, close on something unmarkable. A finishable first question settles the session. A last question with no right answer turns it into a conversation.
- Length should track stamina, not a target number. Paragraph length and question count move independently, because they cost the learner different things.
How question types map to goals
The type names differ between methodologies, but the underlying demands repeat. It helps to start from what you want out of a question and work back to the type.
- Warm up, or recover on a hard day: spell-only. Motor work, no comprehension load, and always completable.
- Check that the text landed: known-answer questions, or the C4E predictable question. One right answer, sitting in the paragraph.
- Give the learner a choice: semi-open questions, or the C4E range question. Several answers are valid, so the learner picks, which is a small piece of authorship.
- Show thinking beyond the text: prior knowledge questions, which ask for something the paragraph never supplied.
- Change the kind of attention: numbers and math questions, which use a different part of the board.
- Keep motor demand low while thinking stays real: two-option questions, as RPM uses throughout and C4E uses once per paragraph.
- Ask for restatement: paraphrase questions, which the Spellers Method uses and the others do not.
- Stop assessing and start talking: open-ended questions, and in S2C the creative writing prompt. No answer key, by design.
Where to go next
For the anatomy of a lesson with a complete worked example, read letterboard lessons. For age-respecting academic content aimed at learners who use AAC of any kind, including those not on a letterboard, read AAC lesson plans. And for lesson plans shaped to a specific methodology, start with Spellers Method or S2C.
SpellerLessons generates the lesson half of this work: a paragraph at the reading level you choose, on a topic the learner cares about, with target words embedded and a question set in the structure of whichever methodology you work in. It is an authoring tool and nothing more. What it removes is the hour or two per lesson that writing this material by hand costs, which is why so many learners receive content written for someone years younger.
Common questions
Usually the one your practitioner already trained in, because the methodology is not really a choice you make from a website. Each has its own training, its own vocabulary for the same ideas, and its own lesson shape, and a family that picks an approach the people around them cannot support ends up with material nobody knows how to run. If you are starting from nothing, look at which trained practitioners are reachable from where you live, in person or by video call, and let that narrow the field before anything else does.
To write or generate lesson content, no. To run a session well, yes, and we would rather say so plainly. A lesson is paper. It does not teach you how to hold a board, how to prompt, how to fade support, or how to read a motor response, and those are the parts that need a person who does this work. I-ASC, the Spellers organization, and HALO each run their own training, and the links at the bottom of this page go to them rather than to us.
Treat content and vocabulary as two separate dials. Subject matter should match the learner's age, because a teenager handed a lesson about farm animals learns what you think of them. Sentence complexity and word choice should track their reading level so the text is actually decodable. When people say age-appropriate, that combination is what they mean. If you are unsure of the reading level, start slightly below where you think it sits and move up, since a lesson that reads easily still teaches, while one that stalls costs the whole session.
Yes, when the reading level and the interest line up. A lesson written about volcanoes at a sixth-grade level suits any learner near that level who finds volcanoes interesting, and reusing it saves the hour that writing a fresh one costs. What does not travel well is a lesson written for one methodology run inside another, because the question types and their order are part of what the methodology is. Rebuild the question set rather than borrowing it, even when the paragraph itself carries over unchanged.
Fewer than a worksheet, because every answer is spelled one letter at a time and the motor cost is real. A learner early in their motor practice may do a paragraph and four questions. A practised speller may work through twenty across several types. The useful habit is to treat paragraph length and question count as independent dials, since they tax different things, and to end the session while the learner still has something left rather than at a number you decided in advance.