A good phonics workbook?

It’s a little hard for a workbook to cover sounds :-) SOunds like you’ve got an able reader if s/he’s already mastered short & long! (THanks Victoriah for saying that more clearly — because, seriously, a strong visual learner can do workbooks all day long, get thigns right, and not learn a whit of phonics.)

I like Rudginsky’s _How To Teach Spelling_ for words and dictations for phonics as far as you’d want to go (includes digraphs, etc). Any O-G type program will cover all the regular sounds, too (Patterns for Success by Henry is one that comes to mind).

I strongly recommend Scholar’s Choice Check and Double Check Phonics. Books 1 and 2 cover all the basics. Books 3 and 4 cover multisyllables and details. Since phonics deals with *sounds* it’s vital that this material be *taught* *orally*; silent seatwork in phonics is a contradiction in terms. Given that, this is a good complete program.
The books are quite inexpensive, also a bonus.
You can get them at scholarschoice.ca (note .ca, NOT .com) They mail easily in US abnd Cabnada.

Jess,

Jolly Phonics produces a range of small workbooks that cover all the phonemes. I don’t know whether you can buy them in the US but you should be able to order them online or by phone. They cost 1.50 sterling, I guess that’s about 3 dollars each. I think there are about 6 in the set. Also the Jolly Phonics handbook, has a worksheet for each letter sound. Each worksheet shows how to write/form the letters, has a list of words containing the sounds and pictures to colour in. The handbook also has word lists of cvc, ccvc words etc., the letter sounds that can be cut out and stuck into a sound book (work book), and simple spelling lists. They do a whole pack including videos, reading books, which schools can buy in the UK on sale or return, I don’t know if the same applies to overseas.

I haven’t seen the full Jolly Phonics program, just publicity and sample pages. From what I’ve seen it is perfectly OK, probably good for introductory work, but it lacks the teaching of *integration* of skills that is so important. That’s why I keep recommending the Check and Double Check from Scholar’s Choice – not only are skills taught in isolation, they are then taught in various modes of combination, compare and contrast, etc. All book recommendations are of course given with the caveat that you have to *teach* the material, the book doesn’t do it for you, and you have to *say* the sounds and have the student say them too, all the time. Given that, I find the C&DC series the best I have yet seen.

A workbook is only as good as the instruction that goes with it!

Are you a teacher looking for classroom materials? Are you a parent teaching or remediating a struggling reader?

I think Jolly Phonics is great for K-1st grade. The materials are excellent. The materials are almost impossible to get in the U.S. right now. The teacher/parent manual is available at amazon.com but all other new materials are out of stock. Some workbooks are available used on the Amazon Marketplace. On their UK web site, they do not list US/Canada materials for sale. By the way, Diane McGuinness has a new book out, Growing a Reader From Birth, where she highly recommends Jolly Phonics. It’s a great book.

Of course other reading programs have workbooks. The PhonoGraphix reading method, popularized in Reading Reflex, has workbooks available from www.readamerica.net. They’re a bit amateurish but do the job teaching kids to read (with adult instruction).

Michael Bend, of ABeCeDarian Company in Wilmington, DE is developing work books too. They are very good.

Linda W.[/i]

Get Jolly Phonics and many other things:

Scholar’s Choice, at scholarschoice.ca (note that’s .ca, NOT .com) bills and mails in both US and Canada (near enough the border that they just run shipments across, no mail delays)

Last time I looked, they listed the Joly Phonics series as well as many others.

I happen to prefer their Check and Double Check series for many reasons, including price (one inexpensive book instead of five or ten supposedly cheaper — they add up) but mostly for content.

I do not work for this company and have no connection to them; just referring teachers to a good resource.

Linda,

I did not have trouble finding the order information on the Jolly Learning site. I ordered directly from the US distributor which is listed on the site:

http://www.jollylearning.co.uk/

Jolly Learning Ltd, 50 Winter Sport Lane, Williston, VT 05495-0020
Tel: 1-800-488-2665 Fax: (802) 864-7626

When you click on each item, it’ll give you the UK version and the N. American version order numbers. You can also click at the bottom of the US order info page and get a full US price list and order form. It’s all on the UK site.

But I agree that Jolly Phonics is a K-1 program. It is not for remediation of older kids and it does not teach all the code that PG does. I’d use it if I could find a five year old who is ready to read for the first time, though!

Janis

For phonics workbooks that cover almost everything, many people use Explode the Code by EPS books.

Janis

Thanks for the information Janis. I will try again on the Jolly Phonics site.

I like the first few Explode the Code workbooks especially for students who need lots of practice with ccvc and cvcc words.

But the more advanced workbooks teach concepts that I don’t think you would agree with and is why I don’t use them. For instance, Explode the Code teaches “blends”. When you get to bl, tr, st, pr, etc. etc., they treat two sounds as one sound. I think they even underline them so it really sends the wrong message.

When I first started using commercially produced so-called “phonics” stuff and saw blends being taught as separate sounds, I nearly fell off my chair. Talk about illogical! First we start with an alphabetic system with 26 letters to represent 44 or 45 sounds — OK, imperfect, but 26 letters are pretty easy to learn. Then we add on fifty or more blends as separate sounds — this is called shooting yourself in the foot. It more than doubles the workload for absolutely no gain in learning.
In fact, I have seen a lot of kids for whom it is an active negative; I have one adult student now, age 18 and we have moved from Grade 2 to Grade 4 level reading; he was taught blends as separate independent items, and he will insert an r or an n or whatever at random when he is trying to sound out, because he was drilled in br but all he actually looks at is the b. I am working to get this out of his system but after all these years it’s a lot of unlearning.

On the other hand, both for reading and spelling, it does help to be familiar with all the common letter combinations. *After* the single-letter code is learned, and then the digraphs that do stand for one sound (sh, ch, th, ph = f, ng), it doesn’t hurt to look at the cr, fr, dr, cl, fl, etc. etc. patterns as patterns. The Check and Double Check books that I keep recommending do this, and they make a very clear distinction between digraphs where you hear only one sound and blends where you hear two separate sounds. This is good (in fact I think necessary) for kids with some auditory weakness and/or sloppiness, who tend to omit the second sound of the blend in both reading and writing, or as my adult student does, fill in an extra sound at random. I find working through the pages where you change bat to brat, cab to crab, fill to frill, pay to play, band to bland, and so on and so forth, are a big help in improving accuracy in both reading and writing. Of course doing this compare-and-contrast kind of work is the exact opposite of the drill-as-one-sound idea that made me fall off the chair.

Phonics got a bad name because teachers used workbooks as a visual exercise and did not accompany with auditory analysis skills. The best series is Explode the Code as it is multilevelled and has an extra side step for those students who need further reinforcement. I would suggest that you look at Rosner’s decoding word pattern in the appendix of his book. These patterns are in 1,2, 3, syllable words and reinforce “common word patterns and would make a great spelling program. Hope this helps.