Finger spelling is a technique which helps children in first and second grade and remedial classes learn to spell short-vowel words, sound by sound, using their fingers as aids. (SW)

Suggestions are made for incorporating finger-spelling with sound blending in spelling instruction for handicapped and nonhandicapped children. Teaching materials are described, and five steps in teaching how to spell a three letter word are listed. (CL)

A teacher devised an activity based on the game show "Wheel of Fortune" to spark her deaf students' interest in fingerspelling. "Fingerspelling Fortune" spells out puzzles using cards with handshapes. As the cards are turned and the students try to guess the phrases, they increase proficiency in recognizing handshapes. (VW)

The authors describe the results from a study using sign language and the manual alphabet to improve spelling skills of learning disabled second graders. (SBH)

The manual alphabet was used as an adjunct to a linguistic reading system to achieve the following goals with primary grade learning disabled children: (1) ensure attention, (2) reinforce the learning of phonemes, (3) guide the student if he had difficulties, (4) introduce prefixes and suffixes, and (5) provide the child with an independent…

Discusses background information about the deaf that may be useful to reading teachers working with older deaf students; suggests additional sources of information on sign language and reading instruction for the deaf. (MKM)

The reciprocal teaching procedure, which involves interactive dialogue and teacher modeling, was used to teach prereading skills (finger spelling, book reading, story retelling, and word recognition) to 23 prelingually deaf kindergarten and first-grade students. Pre-post test analyses showed that gains were made in letter, word, and story…