Jolly Phonics: A Fun Way to Learn to Read!

Funded Sep 2, 2014

Thank you so much for your generous donation! My students absolutely love learning new letters and ways to spell different sounds using Jolly Phonics. They sing the songs from Jolly Phonics constantly. When I pull students to work in a small group, their faces light up and they ask, "Are we going to do Jolly?" They like working in small groups, but their favorite seems to be the whole group reviews where I project the program onto my whiteboard. They think the program is very cool and they even impress themselves when they can sound out a "tricky word" using what they have learned.

The Jolly Phonics program is very flexible and thorough. I am able to use the program at my table in small groups or at the carpet with the whole class. At my table, I load the program on my computer without connecting it to a projector. I meet with three to five students at a time to review old sounds and learn new spellings. This way, I am able to target individual students' needs and remediate or accelerate depending on the group. With the whole class, I review sounds and spellings everyone knows while projecting the program on the whiteboard. This way, we get to practice the songs and sound out words to spiral review weekly. The use of stories, songs, and motions really helps to reinforce their learning and makes it very "sticky" for them. All of my students made their growth goal in reading since the beginning of the year.

I have noticed a huge jump in my students' learning, particularly with my struggling readers. Before using the program, I had three students who had difficulty remembering all of the letter names and sounds and they were not consistently able to blend sounds together to make words. Now, those three students remember all of the letters sounds and they are able to blend sounds together to read new and unfamiliar words. This is a huge win that will help them catch up to grade level so that they are set up for success in elementary school and beyond. For my own teaching, I appreciate being able to have a "common language" with my students that we can use to talk about letters and the sounds they make.

Again, thank you so much. This would not have been possible without you and your generosity.”

With gratitude,

Mr. Ring