Good morning everybody,

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”: