Jolly Phonics is a fun and child centred approach to teaching literacy through synthetic phonics. With this method, children learn each of 42 letter sounds with actions and songs. It is a multi-sensory method because children work at the same time with sight, movement, listening and speaking.
At the beginning of the lesson children listen to the letter sound song and learn the movement. Then, they can repeat the song with the movement and learn the sound. Afterwards, teacher tells them the story created for this letter sound, and tries to improve the pronunciation with some examples. Finally, they have a worksheet-book in which children can consolidate the acquired knowledge.
In this link you can find several jolly phonics songs.
From my personal experience, I was fortunate because last year, in my practicum II, I had the oportunity to work with this methodology in Infant Education. The first time I saw children making these sounds and pronounce them in a correct way, I was very impressed! It is awesome to see small children doing that. However and without any doubt, the best moment was when I saw them doing dictations only with sounds and gestures, It was amazing! In this moment, I told my tutor that I wanted to do it, and I started to do the dictations. I gave a small blackboard for a group of students and a piece of chalk, then, I started to do the sound with its gesture, and with some sounds and gesture I formed a word and they had to show me and their partners the written word.
Along the days I could see that children learn the sounds perfectly, but also I could see that they had a problem because many times they related the English sound with the Spanish letter, and we had to correct them and repeat the sounds and its graphy.
Regrettably, in the school there was not a connection between the methodology used in Infant Education and the methodology used in Primary Education, because with Jolly phonics they worked in phonics and when they came to Primary, the classes were like Spanish lessons but in English.
In my opinion, this method is tremendously effective if teachers and school have a coherent methodology to continue the work that they started in Infant Education.
Great contribution, Isabel. It is interesting to know about your experience in Practicum II. I consider that it is really important to integrate first the sound and then show the letter. This is important because our 'Spanish' brain tends to link the grapheme to the Spanish sound immediately. This won't be so if we are using English words, and if we show the sounds first. Little by little children will identify the differences between the two languages (and the similarities too!)
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