How often should you listen to reading with Infants?

How often should we listen to reading?  According to Kat, it’s not quantity that counts, but quality.  Listening to reading has to be done in an effective way if it is to be meaningful. 
Tweet This Post

Where can I get the Jolly Phonics font?

First of all, here’s the bad news.  The Jolly Phonics font is not free so you’ll have to buy it.  The font itself is called Sassoon Primary Font and a Google search will give you some options.  Below are some that I have found so see if you can beat the prices I’ve found!

Tweet [...]

How do you explain the difference between “c” and “k”?

You may find the following teaching points helpful:

Letter ‘c’ represents a /k/ sound when preceding the letters ‘a’, ‘o’ and ‘u’.
Short words with short vowels usually end with ‘ck’ and this grapheme never begins words
Letters e, i or y alert the reader that the preceding ‘c’ will represent the /s/ sound. ( ‘soft c’.)

Tweet [...]

Can’t we skip “ai” and the other digraphs?

When I began Jolly Phonics I was a little unsure about the order as I expected the cildren to find the digraphs difficult, however, I went ahead and was delighted to find that they simply accepted that a digraph might be used to represent a sound just as a single letter might be.
Tweet This Post

What readers can I use with the Jolly Phonics scheme?

When I began JP I was eager for the children to begin using readers and I bought a set of Little Phonics First Books:
http://www.syntheticphonics.net/product.php?id=21
To begin with, when you haven’t covered too many sounds, the text in these stories may seem uninspired, however the children have such a sense of achievement because they are actually reading [...]

How do you teach the “ng” sound?

Here are a few suggestions,
Possible Resources:

‘ng’ grapheme card and a set of (magnetic) cards including all graphemes introduced to date
Picture cards eg. someone singing a song/string/ a bird or an aeroplane with both wings visible/ a ping pong bat for table tennis….
A chart with the words: sing/song/singing/wings/ping pong written but with the ‘ng’ in a [...]

Jolly Phonics pronunciation in Irish Schools

Jolly Phonics is a British produced synthetic phonics scheme.  Therefore, sometimes the pronunciation of certain sounds is different to how they are pronounced in Ireland, e.g. “u”, “aw” and even “a”.  Kat2 checked it out…
You have to adapt JP to suit the Irish accent as it is written to reflect ‘British received pronunciation’ (I think [...]

What kind of reading scheme goes with a synthetics phonics programme?

JP was designed to be used as a systematic synthetic phonics programme.
This system is incompatible with teaching children to memorise sight words and in fact is incompatible with requiring the children to guess words using picture, context or initial sound.
For this reason I no longer use ‘reading scheme books’ and when I do use [...]

How many letters do I introduce per week?

If you are using Jolly Phonics as a ‘synthetic phonics’ scheme rather than simply a ‘phonics’ scheme, the aim is to systematically introduce the letter/sound correspondences of the English language and to get the children ‘blending to read’ and ‘segmenting to spell’ a list of cumulatively decodable words containing the letter/sound correspondences (in any [...]

How do you explain the different th sounds?

I found this difficult to explain when I first encountered ‘th’ in Jolly Phonics, particularly as I don’t think my tongue sticks out significantlly when I say either sound naturally!
Tweet This Post