Teacher's Guide - Letterland

© Letterland International Limited. All rights reserved.• Silent letters are not tapped, e.g. through, climb,and gave.Finger Pop-UpsFinger Pop-Ups may be easier for some childrenwho do not yet have the coordination for FingerTapping. When children are reading unknownwords, they begin with a fist and pop up one fingerfor each sound in the word. Then they pull theirfingers back into a fist as they blend all the soundsinto a word.Finger TappingIn Finger Tapping the child touches each finger tothe thumb in sequence saying a sound with eachtap. Then the child sweeps the thumb across thefingers to blend the sounds into a word (or simplytouches all the fingers to the thumb at once).FingerPop-UpsFingerTappingActivities for SegmentingWords to SpellUse the activities below when the objective is tolisten for the sounds to spell a word. Suchactivities include Live Spelling, spelling wordswith Letterland Word Builders, and any time achild is unsure of the spelling of a word.Playing Pitch and Catch with Words’This is a good way to make sure you haveeveryone’s attention and to prepare them to say thewhole word in a normal fashion before attemptingto segment the word. You can use it with bothrubber-band-stretching and Finger Soundingbelow.• Tell the children you are going to pretend topitch a word to them. Hold up you handready to catch a ball. You catch theball by repeating the word I say.• Say the word as you make a pitching motion.The children repeat the word as they make acatching motion.• Now their hands are up and they are ready torubber-band-stretch the word or to FingerSound.Rubber-band-stretching• Tell the children to hold their hands in front ofthem palm to palm. Let’s pretend we havea big rubber-band wrapped around ourhands and we want to stretch it out butwe have to go slow because it is astrong rubber-band.• Have them slowly stretch their hands out andback in a few times. When we bring ourhands back together we have to useour strong muscles and make our handscome back together slowly and silentlybecause we are going to be listening forsounds in words.• Let’s try stretching out someone’s name.How about Jasmine. It may sound likeyour Momma’s calling you from downthe block. Everyone slowly pulls their handsapart as they say, “Jaaaasssmmmiiiinnnne.”Try a few other names to get children used to theidea of slowly saying all the sounds in the wordin stretched out fashion.• ‘Stop’ sounds such as those for b, c, d, g, j, k, p,q, t, and x can not be stretched’ but most othersounds including all the vowels can beprolonged.• To rubber-band-stretch a word for spellingeveryone says the word slowly as they pull theirhands apart as shown below.ssssăăădssss ăăă d• Then everyone begins to stretch the word again,this time ‘jiggling out’ the first sound by movingthe hands back and forth a bit just afterbeginning to say the word. Then stretch aboutmidway and ‘jiggle out’ the vowel sound. Finallystretch hands out to the farthest position andjiggle out the final sound. (If using a word withmore than three sounds, then stop at the35