Learn to Read with Jolly Literacy

Even though it's summer time, Katie has been working on a special review program.  The folks at jollyliteracy.com (just2ducks LLC) sent us their comprehensive reading program, which includes the Jolly Literacy Teacher's Book (in print letters); the Jolly Phonics Student Books, 1, 2, and 3; The Jolly Grammar level 1 Teacher's Book (in print letters); the Jolly Grammar level 1 Student Book; and Jolly Songs (in print letters).  Along with these review items, we received a catalog of additional Jolly Literacy products, and My Personal Dictionary from Primary Learning.  Wow, what a package!

Miss Katie is 5.  She did a "relaxed" kindergarten last year, and is still working on learning to read.  Although, she surprised me the last time we went to the zoo.  We were driving, and she said, "That says zoo!" when we passed a plain, no pictures, street sign.  I did a double take and asked, "How do you spell zoo?"  She answered Z-O-O.  She's learning more than I realized.

We started out with the Phonics book 1, just to get our feet wet.  Each lesson has a short story and a motion to go along with it.  The motions are a great idea for squirmy students to help get the wiggles out.  Little kids generally don't do well with sitting still for long periods of time, so beginning readers will benefit from these seemingly "silly" motions and sounds.  The workbook portion of the lessons are short and simple, which gives children a sense of accomplishment when they're starting out.

We also began playing the Jolly Songs CD, which is full of catchy little tunes to help kids learn the sounds that letters make.  The individual clips are short.  I liked to put it on in the car and let it play when I had younger kids in the van with me.

Although Katie already knows how to properly form her letters, and what sounds they make, she had a little bit of a harder time with the pictures at the bottom of the pages in the phonics book 1.  Katie did not begin learning English until she was almost 3 years old, so she's still not familiar with all the possible names of the "everyday" objects pictured.  Students are asked to cross out the picture that does not contain a certain sound.  In addition to increasing her vocabulary, this was good listening practice for her!

As the Phonics Student Book 1 progressed, we worked on not only individual letters, but also double letters and blends.  Book 2 starts off with students reading whole words, and covers the various short vowel sounds, writing, tracing, drawing, and more.  Children begin copywork in book 2, with the teacher writing a sentence on the board, and the students copying it.  Kids learn that sentences start with a capital letter and end with a period.  They are reminded to leave a space (we call them "finger spaces" in our homeschool) between each word.  At the teacher's discretion, students may be asked to come up with their own sentences.  Book 3 takes the skills learned in the first two books and expounds on them with more independent writing, bigger words, reading sentences, and even a crossword puzzle!  Jolly Phonics is a comprehensive reading program, broken down into 3 books to be less intimidating to the student.  There are also readers available in 4 levels, from beginner to confident reader.

Although not completely through the phonics program, we took a look at the Grammar book to see what it was like.  The first page allows the student to personalize the book, not only with their name, but also a self portrait.

This book contains many activities with words.  Students get to trace, draw, write dictation, and more.  The back of the book has 36 ten-word spelling tests.  By the end of the book, students are reading a 3 paragraph story containing words like orange, yummy, sunflowers, watch and summer.  They are then asked to identify different parts of speech by underlining them in various colors.  I'm excited to see how much Katie's skills will progress when we start working through this book!

This is Miss Katie's /oo/ face.  Not oo like in smooth, but oo like in took.  We had quite a time differentiating between the two /oo/ sounds.  Actually, when sounding out the words at the bottom of the page, she kept wanting to double the sounds.  B-oo-oo-k.  We are finding Jolly Phonics book 1 to be both simple enough to hold our interest and keep us (okay me) willing to work on it, and at the same time, challenging enough that I know Katie is learning new things.  I'm impressed.  That's a delicate balance.  I look forward to working through the rest of the program this coming school year.  I feel confident that it will help Katie become a strong reader.

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