The Ladybird Keywords Series..

I personally learnt how to read at school using the oxford reading tree series. However I have found that Mr A seems to enjoy the Peter and Jane books by Ladybird. I love the format of these books and their simplicity whilst still enabling the child to develop their reading skills after each book. I am therefore planning on purchasing the entire set.

Flash Cards..

I ordered these Flash Cards from amazon to help Mr A learn high frequency words as well as common words and they seem to be helping. I would definitely recommend them.

Here they are all over our kitchen..

As you can see there are a couple of additional cards we made to help us read the next book more easily. This is an idea recommended in The Well Trained Mind which suggests doing a flash card drill   for words that will appear in the next book. This puts their learning into practice straight away and is much more effective than learning flash cards simply for the sake of learning flash cards!

Learning Vowels

The Letter Sounds...

The 42 Phonemes and their actions

Teaching more complicated sounds

These are the main sounds in the English language written in the order that they are to be taught according to the jolly phonics programme.

High Frequency Words..

High frequency words are quite simply those words which occur most frequently in written material, for example, "and", "the", "as" and "it". They are often words that have little meaning on their own, but they do contribute a great deal to the meaning of a sentence. Some of the high frequency words can be sounded out using basic phonic rules, e.g. "it" is an easy word to read using phonics. However, many of the high frequency words are not phonically regular and are therefore hard to read in the early stages. These words are sometimes called tricky words, sight words or camera words. In addition to being difficult to sound out, most of the high frequency words have a rather abstract meaning which is hard to explain to a child. InshaAllah I will be going over these with Mr A.

Tricky Words

These are the list of tricky words that I am planning to go over with Mr A from the jolly phonics handbook. This is the reading scheme I have been using so far with Mr A to teach him how to read. He has also found the alphablocks game on the CBeebies website very helpful in picking up blending and forming words.

We also tried the BRI ARI reading scheme. But Mr A seems to get fed up of doing this after a short while as the books are not very exciting. I also find that going straight onto books in order to learn how to read is not the best way for us. This is where jolly phonics comes in, as their principle is to learn how to read as many words as possible with confidence before going onto books.