Jolly Phonics: A programme that grows with your children

By: Ms. Lace David, Preschool Teacher

In an era when early childhood education is more crucial than ever, Sekolah Harapan Bangsa Preschool has been proud to incorporate Jolly Phonics into our preschool English curriculum for many years. This innovative programme, known for its systematic, multisensory approach to literacy instruction, not only improves our students' reading and writing abilities but also ignites their enthusiasm for learning. By integrating Jolly Phonics, we are ensuring that our young learners develop a strong, confident foundation in literacy, setting them on a path to academic success and a lifelong love of reading.

Jolly Phonics teaches children to read and write using synthetic phonics, which is widely regarded as the most effective method of teaching children to read and write in English. That occurred over 25 years ago. Since then, their incredible progress has been studied in numerous research projects, with the results leading to phonics becoming central to the UK curriculum. Today, Jolly Phonics is used in over 100 countries around the world. As the leading and most experienced synthetic phonics publisher, we provide a seven-year school programme that includes not only phonics but also spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
How does Jolly Phonics work?
Jolly Phonics is a comprehensive programme, based on the proven, fun, and multi-sensory synthetic phonics method that gets children reading and writing from an early age. This means that we teach letter sounds as opposed to the alphabet. These 42 letter sounds are phonic building blocks that children, with the right tools, use to decode the English language. When reading a word, they recognise the letters and blend the respective sounds; when writing a word, they identify the sounds and write down the corresponding letters. These skills are called blending and segmenting. These are two of the five skills that children need to master phonics:

Learning the letter sounds: Children are taught 42 letter sounds, which is a mix of alphabet sounds (1 sound – 1 letter) and digraphs (1 sound – 2 letters) such as sh, th, ai and ue. Using a multi-sensory approach each letter sound is introduced with fun actions, stories and songs. We teach the letter sounds in 7 groups of 6 letters at a pace of 4-5 sounds a week. Children can start reading after the first group of letters has been taught and should have been introduced to all the 42 letter sounds after 9 weeks at school.

Learning letter formation: This is taught alongside the introduction of each letter sound. Typically, children will learn how to form and write the letters down during the course of the lesson.

Blending: Once the first few letter sounds are learnt, children begin blending the sounds together to help them read and write new words.

Segmenting: When children start reading words, they also need to start identifying the phonic components that make the word sound the way it does. By teaching blending and segmenting at the same time children become familiar with assembling and breaking down the sounds within words.

Tricky words These are words with irregular parts, such as ‘who’ and ‘I’. Children learn these as exceptions to the rules of phonics. Introducing the common tricky words early in the year increases reading fluency (as they frequently occur in those first simple sentences you might expect them to read).

Alongside these skills, children are also introduced to the main alternative spelling of vowels. These five skills form the foundation that children build on with each year of grammar teaching.

Reference: https://www.jollylearning.co.uk/jolly-phonics/