Isabella State School

Jolly Phonics Information Session

A bit of background…

Learning to read is a complex process, which involves many interrelated skills. The skills are not always sequential, sometimes they are learned simultaneously. The skills a child must master are as follows; Developing oral language / knowledge of vocab Recognising letters of the alphabet Learning the sounds associated with the letters Word families and word building Sight word vocabulary Decoding Punctuation and capitalisation Spelling patterns Comprehension Please note: These are not presented in the order they have to be learnt.

What is Jolly Phonics?

• • • Jolly Phonics is a systematic synthetic phonics program designed to teach children to read and write.

Children learn the 42 letter sounds of the English language, rather than the alphabet.

They are then taken through the stages of blending and segmenting words to develop reading and writing skills.

5 Basic skills in Jolly Phonics?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Learning the letter sounds (introducing actions) Learning Letter formation Blending Identifying sounds in words Tricky Words

• • • •

Learning the letter sounds

The 42 main sounds of English are introduced first.

Children learn each letter by its sound, not its name (for instance, ‘a’ is learnt as it is heard in ‘ant’).

The sounds are not introduced alphabetically, but in seven carefully selected groups.

The first group (s, a, t, i, p, n) can be combined to create the largest number of simple three letter words. Eg. sat, sit, ant, tip, sip, tap Letters that are easily confused like ‘b’ and ‘d’ are presented in separate groups.

The seven groups of letter sounds are;

Learning the letter sounds cont...

• Some sounds are written with two letters such as ‘ee’ and ‘or’ – these are known as digraphs. Being able to recognise graphs, digraphs, trigraphs and quadgraphs is really important when decoding - At Isabella SS this is a whole school focus.

Learning the letter sounds cont...

• Each letter sound has a corresponding action.

By performing the action for each sound, students are using kinesthetic, auditory, visual and speech methods to help them remember the letter representing the sound.

Ask your child the sound and ask what the action is.. Get them to teach it to you!

Learning Letter Formation

Students are taught how to form each letter in the correct way as they are being taught. They first use their finger to imitate how the teacher forms the letter in the air or on the board. They then move on to form letters using a pencil.

Lower case formation is concentrated on initially, then the formation of capital letters is taught.

Segmenting & Blending

Segmenting

is the process of breaking up the word into sounds and process of running the sounds together to make a word.

Blending

is the For eg. The word to form the word.

sat

is segmented –

s-a-t

and then run the sounds together Segmenting and blending can be quite difficult for beginning to read students as they might not know their sounds well enough and lose track of the word if the letter sounds are not emphasised correctly.

Great tip : Jolly Phonics suggests saying the sounds quickly to hear the word and saying the first sound slightly louder!

Eg. S -a-t

Tricky Words

How hard is the English Language to learn? The answer is…. Very hard! Here is why… Some words in English have irregular spelling and can’t be read by blending… Try sounding out; These irregular words are called ‘Tricky Words’ in the Jolly Phonics Program and have to memorised separately to increase reading fluency. This is begun once the students are able to recognise all the 42 sounds and blend them into simple words.

How can you help as Parents?

The Jolly Phonics program encourages parental support because of the beneficial effect of praise and encouragement to all children whilst learning. It advises parents to be guided by the pace at which their child wants to go, and to practice letter sounds and literacy skills with them. Extra practice at home will lead to greater fluency in your child’s reading.

Sooo… • • • Grab yourself a “Helpful Hints for Parents’ sheet and a set of sounds and their actions..

Find out what letter is being taught in the classroom that day or for the week and practice these sounds with your child. If you are not sure about articulating the sound correctly, talk to the teacher, look at the action.. It gives you a big clue!

When you know the first set of sounds have been taught… see if you can start segmenting and blending the letters to make words… Put them on your fridge and practice them.