Finger Puppet Support - letters and their pure sounds
Help your child learn to read and contribute to our dream of increased child literacy while having fun, with the Steve Parish Finger Puppet Storybook range. These Finger Puppet Storybooks are the result of more than 30 years of the authors’ broad, practical experience in teaching kids to read. They are designed to encourage early literacy in children at all levels of ability, and while the introduction of sounds in each book is ordered for ease of hearing and pronunciation, parents can choose whichever book title they consider matches their child’s reading ability. Plus, they all contain Australian animals that delight children.
The first five books focus on a select order of sounds, allowing children to begin blending words from very early in the storybook series. After having learnt just six sounds, children can begin to identify and construct vowel-consonant (v-c) words and consonant-vowel-consonant (c-v-c) words. Once the principle of blending is mastered, they will easily move on to more complex c-c-v-c words and beyond.
The correct pronunciation of these sounds is very important.
The letter names ("ay", "bee", "cee") should not be used; rather, apply the "pure" sounds of letters, as we actually hear them in words. These pure sounds are called phonemes and the method of teaching children how to read by using the pure sounds of letters is called phonics.
The written representation of each letter or letter combination is called a grapheme.