Hello everyone,
I hope all of you are having a great weekend!
This is going to be my first post and I thought it will be interesting to write about my experience using jolly phonics in the private English classes I give to my little students from the second term of Primary education in San Sebastián de los Reyes.
As we all have had the opportunity to know about this way of teaching phonetics in the Literature class, I said to myself, why not try this with my kids so I made some cards instead of buying or printing material because I didn’t know if it was going to work or if I was going to achieve my aim during the lesson.
I have to say that I was incredibly surprised about how easy it was for the kids to remember every single sound in just one lesson (in the first class we just did five sounds). I tried to teach them new vocabulary so it was going to be catchier for them if they didn’t know the meaning of the word that was associated with the sound.
Also, if you are really expressive or even silly with them when you pronounce every sound, the kids really love it. With some of the words that were difficult for them to know the meaning I did the action related to the word and they immediately knew what I was talking about.
Last but not least, I should mention the fact that I didn’t find enough jolly phonics materials on their own site as you have to buy the majority of it. There is a part on the website that says “free resources” where you can download some worksheets and stuff.
I’m looking forward to my next post on the blog and can’t wait to read other people’s experiences.
Lourdes
Hi Lourdes!!
Firstly, I would like to tell you that, in my opinion, your idea of applying the contents we have worked on during the class to your own personal life as teacher is really great, because it is a proper way to check if, in this case, Jolly Phonics, and, therefore, the method they are based on, Synthetic Phonics, are useful for teaching literacy; and it helps you to feel and find its advantages and disadvantages, to reflect on how it can be improved, and to have a general idea of it for classroom debates or commentaries in the blog based on your personal experience.
Regarding the lesson itself, I can notice that you worked with scaffolding, teaching your students also the new vocabulary through actions, so that they tried to imagine the meaning by themselves, understood the songs and did not get confused or bored. I really agree with this methodology, as I believe scaffolding is necessary to achieve good learning outcomes and it facilitates the lessons’ carrying out and the children’s understanding in each stage.
Furthermore, I like the fact of preparing the materials on your own, not buying or printing them, as that lets you do the way you find the best possible and make the adaptations needed.
Finally, I wish we could read more interesting info and anecdotes about your private classes, and I believe that it would be great if we can watch a little video/performance displaying how the lessons are carried out (although the kids do not appear) in order to see the process in practice.
Thank you for sharing your experience with us!
Hello Rocio,
First of all, I would like to thank you for taking your time to read my post and also to comment on it. I was amazed by the idea that i was working with scaffolging, my aim was to teach new vocabulary without making the class really boring or without any sense, through jolly phonics.
I really like seeing my classmates comments and I can not wait to share more experiences during my private english classes.
See you soon
Hello Lourdes!! After reading your post I just wanted to say a couple of things to you.
The first one is congratulations!!! I think it is a really good idea to put into practice the things we are learning in class, because sometimes we are in class learning something and we think oh this is really good! But sometimes we are not really sure about if that can work in a real class with real students and in a real context. For that reason I congratulate you, because you have had the chance to put into practice and you could check the effectivity of “jolly phonics”. I have to say that as we know these is know a magic formula for something to work always, I’m sure that your students learnt with this method cause you did a good work with it.
The second thing I wanted to say is a question, are you going to keep using jolly phonics in your classes? Because I think that if the experience was good, they enjoy it and you know they learn it in a good way you should keep using it.
That was all, wish you the best in the rest of your private English classes!
Good post, Lourdes, although I miss some more information about how you structure the class and which difficulties you met. I consider it a good idea to put the method into practice so that you can see how it works. Remember that Phonics does not teach Phonetics. If you have questions about this, let me know.
Nice comments from your classmates, maybe somebody can help and help Lourdes find Phonics resources…
Hello Raquel!
Thanks for reading my first post. I agree with what you said, I also thought about attaching pictures of my materials and a little video but for time reasons i could not do it.
I would also like to mention that I was a little bit mixed up with both of the concepts “phonetics” and “phonics” but I already know the differences. Thank you very much.
Hi Lourdes,
I love your post. It is really brilliant because it is related with our future aims as teachers. As some classmate has said in your post, it is very important to know how the methodology is and how to apply it but also as teachers is really important to know if things that we have learnt in class will be useful for children or not.
As we are not teachers yet, we could prove in our private classes, but I have noticed a problem…. I don’t know if all of us have the possibility to teach with this methodology in private classes or similar.
It could be interesting that people or someone who have been able to apply this experiences share with us their conclusions.
From my point of view, I find more useful to create our own Jolly Phonics’ materials for many reasons. On one hand, you can adjust the learning process to each student to make it more personalized. On the other hand, if we make the materials we know more about them and is easier for us to explain in the best way.
Related with Rocio’s comment, I hope to know more about your curiosities in your private classes and share with us all of the most important things that you consider relevant.
To end, I only have to say thank you for your post and I hope your next really impacient.
Hi!
I am really happy that you liked my first post. It is true that in the end it is easier to create your own material according to the student’s needs and to focus on what you really want to teach them. Thank you for taking your time to read it, I will share many others experiences as I love to see what are my classmates’ opinions about it.