Finger Puppet Support - blue words
Finger puppet books are designed to be read by adults and children reading together. Adults read the left-hand page to the child, as if reading a normal story book. The right-hand page, however, contains some very simple words for the child to read back to the adult. All of words on the right-hand page, except for those in blue, contain simple letters that can be sounded out using the pure sounds (phonemes) of each letter and can be blended together to make a meaningful word.
Unfortunately, English often employs the same grapheme for slightly different sounds. For example, there are three different ways of sounding out the letter "a". The short "a" sound is the pure sound as in "apple".
There are also some instances where the pure sounds are not used. For instance, in the words "ape", "range" and "dale", the "a" sounds like the name of the letter itself ("ay") and not like the short or pure sound. In other pronunciations, the letter "a" can have a long sound, like "arrrr" as in "art", "market" etc.
The varied ways of pronouncing letters can confuse children who are still learning to read. Whenever the child-read component of the Finger Puppet Books includes a grapheme that is not pronounced in its pure sound, the word will be coloured blue. Children may need adult help with the blue words until they get the idea that there is something unusual about that particular word. Eventually, they will begin to recognise these word exceptions by sight and will be able to read the word without adult prompting.