If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or email alerts. Thanks for visiting!
- How do I teach her to say ‘put’ the right way? As far as she is concerned, ‘u’ is pronounced the way it is in ‘umbrella’. So she reads ‘cut’, ‘but’ and ‘nut’ OK but when it comes to ‘put’, I’m stuck.
- How do I make her understand that ‘cake’ starts with a ‘c’ and not a ‘k’?
- How do I explain to her that she reads ‘hug’ correctly but when a single letter ‘e’ is added to the end, she has to read it as though she were reading ‘hewj’?
- How do I teach her to read ‘door’? When I try to read it the way we pronounce it, she corrects me saying that since it has two o’s, it needs to be pronounced the way ‘good’ is pronounced.
- What do I say when she asks “Why is it called a kitchen counter Appa? Is it because you can count on it?”
Recently during my trip to India, my mom who runs a 450-student kindergarten introduced me to a new system that she had employed in recent times to educate kids regarding identifying phonetics in the English language. This new system is Jolly Phonics, created by Sue Llyod, a UK teacher. This system has been evaluated extensively in Canada and other nations and has been known to show impressive results for ESOL (English as a Second Language) children (that’s us Indians, dude).
As Michelle Blaxall-Robinson from New Zealand reviews, Jolly Phonics divides up English language into 42 main sounds and associates it with an action. Some of the sounds/actions that this method employs are:
s - Weave hand in an s shape, like a snake, and say ssssss
a - Wiggle fingers above elbow as if ants crawling on you and say a, a, a.
t - Turn head from side to side as if watching tennis and say t, t, t.
i - pretend to be a mouse by wriggling fingers at end of nose and squeak i, i, i.
p - Pretend to puff out candles and say p, p, p.
n - Make a noise, as if you are a plane - hold arms out and say nnnnnn.
The teacher when using this method might appear a little foolish but personal experience in my mom’s school has proven the validity of this method and what’s more, they are fun for the children. Children usually learn quicker if they actively participate in the learning process and do activities involved in learning. Jolly Phonics involves the children in a fun way and makes learning the various sounds of the confusing English language more simple. The learning process is also enhanced, as my mom told me, if you narrate a story with the sound and the actions and also involve a certain character that is common in all stories. This technique is more suited to the Indian context where the child is exposed to a multitude of languages especially in an urban setting where you speak in English at home, in your regional language at home, and in Hindi with your friends, and some other regional language with your neighbors. This method may not explain why alphabets sounds different in different words but it will definitely help identify which those words are.
I am not sure if you can use these techniques at home (as the order is important) to make your child’s learning fun and easy but there are tools and books that help you do just that. The links above should help you get there quicker or just Google Jolly Phonics to get where you want.
by Patrix | on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 12:00 am | 
Education . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
January 30th, 2006 at 3:18 am reply
wah wah…isko kehte hai ‘being prepared’ :p…Ash, that should reassure you! ( feel free to shoot me down now )
January 30th, 2006 at 3:27 am reply
just a lil ring on the finger brings out all the paternal instincts eh? ;o)
January 30th, 2006 at 12:01 pm reply
Shub, LOL ! I don’t think P had anything like that in mind when he wrote this ! But thanks for making sure he gets freaked out now ! :)
January 30th, 2006 at 12:46 pm reply
I sure am freaked out now. I never thought that any posts that I make now will be scrutinized with respect to my engagement.
January 30th, 2006 at 5:30 pm reply
of course was jus pulling ur leg big time! Why do I remember Chandler Bing right now?! :)
January 30th, 2006 at 7:08 pm reply
Shub, of course, I know that! And you are not the first one to make the Chandler connection :)
February 3rd, 2006 at 5:18 am reply
Hey..I hv saved this post..it will help me teach my l’il one ….when he satrts learning..:)