The teaching of both phonemes and graphemes is basic for teaching reading and writing, and it represents one of the biggest challenges to which past, present and future teachers, especially the ones working with Literature in any language, have to deal with. Depending on how the teacher prepares and leads the lesson, including the methodology carried out, the materials and resources used, the way of managing the situations, etc.; the teaching-learning process of phonics may be really motivating, fun and successful, or, on the contrary, it could become a really difficult task for both the teacher and the students, with boring lessons, confusion and even empty learning.

As we have seen in class, there is one method that teachers can follow, called Synthetic Phonics, which is aimed to teach reading and writing basing on how letters or groups of letters correspond with sounds -the link grapheme-phoneme-. As some of my classmates have already explained and demonstrated in their posts, like Susana’s or Miguel Ángel’s, this method has its advantages and disadvantages, and there is a really current debate between those experts that agree with it and consider it really useful and those that totally reject it.

In order to go further with the knowledge on it and be able to have a supported opinion about it, I decided to do some research about the method and about the most popular material to work Synthetic Phonics, which is called Jolly Phonics; and I found something that I considered it was worth it to share with you, hoping that you find it interesting too and useful for your training as future teachers: the five skills –taken as stages-, worked with Jolly Phonics, that are necessary to learn to read and to write.

To begin with, the first stage is the learning of the 42 main letter sounds –including digraphs, like oo, and the different sounds that they can make-, which is carried out through the connection between each sound with an action to represent it. The sounds are learnt following a particular order, from those simpler to those more complex.

Secondly, once children have learnt the sounds, they start the learning of letter formation, which involves children learning how to form and write letters with their pencil, and, as it occurs with the sounds, the learning goes from the most basic and used forms (i.e.: c, which could be used later to make d) to the most complex shapes.

Thirdly, the next stage consists on blending the individual sounds together to make up new words. During this process, it is important to know that we have to be aware of the fact that digraphs, despite of being represented by two letters, they are just one sound.

Then, the fourth stage is called segmenting, and it involves the identification of sounds in words, from the simplest (like cat) to the most complex. In this stage, tapping out the sounds while saying them may help (four taps = 4 sounds).

And the last stage is the learning of tricky words, which are those common words with an irregular spelling that cannot be read by blending. Some methods to learn them are: Look, Cover, Write and Check; Say as it sounds, Mnemonics, etc.

Finally, I would like to share with you the post written by Jaime, which presents a real experience in a classroom working with Jolly Phonics.

Hope you have found this first post interesting!

Rocío Hidalgo.

Jolly Phonics in a class of 1^st of Primary

During my second practical period, I was in a class of 1^st of Primary in where the teacher knows about that method because she learned about it in a course and wants to test it in her class to see if it would works in a real classroom or if it has some weak points that the publishing house didn’t tell them, so my teacher and other teachers of the English department ask the school about the possibility of buying the material to test it in 2 classes: one in 1^st of Primary and the other in 2^nd of Primary.

The school accepted the proposal of the department and buy all the material required to test Jolly Phonics in the school. The material consists on a CD to work with Jolly Phonics at the Digital Whiteboard, flashcards with the sounds individually, in pairs, in trios and words formed and a mural with all the sounds by level.

Start working with the material

When the school receive the material, we start to work with it in class showing firstly the easiest sounds (s, a, t, i, p, n). First we present the letter telling them a story about the picture they see in the mural, then we listen to the song of each one and do the movement and the last thing was doing the activities the publishing house included in the CD.

Although the children like the songs and the movements, that wasn’t the real test of the material, because they can learn the songs and the movements as a game, but the aim of the department was improve the correct pronunciation of the words we saw in class in Science or in English classrooms and for this concept the use of Jolly Phonics was great, because when one child doesn’t pronounce correctly a word, we told him: “This ‘u’ is like the ‘u’ of umbrella, do you remember the movement? And how do you pronounce it?”, so they can evaluate themselves if they are pronounce it well or not and the teachers didn’t say them anything more that “remember the song, the movement and the sound”.

Finally, I post you here a video from YouTube with all the movements of each sound: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqaP19rUwz4

I really enjoyed the lesson about Jolly Phonics. I thought learning them through dances and songs is a very fun way to make our future students realize about the main important pronunciation of some words. Nevertheless, I noticed that, in my opinion, the phonemes you can show through those songs are not enough to make our future students understand the relation between which word or image belongs to which sign, so I began to wonder how I would teach Jolly Phonics to people who is not as good at it as others. Maybe they need more examples or images to relation sounds with words that they are owned.

For this reason I began to look for some information in the web page “Synthetic Phonics” and I found a video called “The Power of Synthetic Phonics to Teach English, by Debbie Hepplewhite”.

That video is about trying to demonstrate the power of Synthetic Phonics on a foreign language by using the early year’s starter package. This means trying how works this method, which consists on teaching reading through being taught the correspondences between phonemes and letters, so, finally, students can identify and blend different letter sounds and combinations together, in order to create a word or to spell new words they only can hear.

Debbie Hepplewhite, who is the teacher that introduces us the method, shows us a very good way to teach children’s first stages the different phonics.

Firstly, she introduces us the first phonemes setting a pre- school child is taught, which are a set of 12 different phonemes.

Secondly, she expounds us a set of suitable cards, which are form by the phoneme, a keyword that involves perfectly the phoneme; an image to get a visual remain of the word, and a set of different words that also contains the phoneme inside their structure.

In that moment, she starts to show us how a class would be taught by using those resources, but also highlighting the importance of modeling every sound she is introducing children and the importance of continuing the process in order to get the most of the students learning.

Finally, she presents us an activity book, which is full of sheets of those resources, in order to make students build their own learning process.

In my opinion, I consider those resources are also very appropriate for children in pre-school because you start working modeling with them since the more basic knowledge and they continue creating their own learning until being expert on distinguish the different non mother tongue phonemes just with hearing a word.

Thank you for your attention!

Here you are the video “The Power of Synthetic Phonics to Teach English, by Debbie Hepplewhite”: