Tags, intensive phonics, cursive first

I don’t know the thread, but I did use this sort of program with my first daughter and here are my thoughts, in case they are helpful.

It was called Jolly Phonics, by a company called Jolly Learning. Its originally British, but is available as a North American version in this country.

The workbooks are available in two version: print, or cursive first. We chose the cursive workbooks

The thinking behind the “cursive first” is that it helps the child to learn blends more quickly. For example vowel blends (oa, ai, ea) and consonant blends (sp, st, and so on).

Having used it, I don’t agree. I don’t think my daughter connected, in her mind, the joining of two letters whilst writing, with the sounding out of a single sound.  She was too busy thinking about forming the letters to make the connection in her mind.  And her hand writing – though not bad – wasn’t brilliant either.  The serifs all came out rather large and ugly, and she got into the habit of beginning serifs before reaching the baseline.  So we switched from the expensive workbooks, to Penny Gardner’s Beauticul Italics for Children, which we LOVE it is so CM friendly, and is available from Penny Gardner’s site for I think about $5 or $10 – fantastic! And since switching to this program, her writing has improved dramitically.

Having said all this, we LOVED the phonics part of the Jolly Phonics program as well as the Jolly Readers, and my 6 year old daughter learned to read quickly and easily, and in such an enjoyable way.  Now that I’m more familiar with CM methods, I rather missed out on helping her to see words in her mind’s eye – so that is something I’m having to work at now, and that I’ll be doing differently with my second daughter.  

So plan with my second child is to use:

Jolly Phonics Stories and Jolly Songs – to teach the phonetic sounds

Suppliment with CM methods (see Soya’s Language Arts handbook – it’s so helpful)

Jolly Readers  – these are carefully sequenced, progressing through the phonetic sounds as well as gradually introducing some sight words.

Penny Gardner’s Beautiful Italics for Children – for copywork  By the way this starts with lower case.

Hope that’s some help

Blessings

Ruth