Authors

When I started teaching at Woods Loke Primary School, Suffolk, UK in the late 1970s, the method of teaching reading was ‘Look and Say’, where children were expected to look at whole words and memorise each one. In order to try and reduce the number of underachievers, our school introduced synthetic phonics. Immediately we noticed a huge improvement in all the children.

The next breakthrough came from a research project. The children were taught to hear and identify the sounds in words at the same time as they were being taught the letter sounds. By the end of the year, all the teachers involved felt that these children were a year ahead of where they would have been if we had not changed our method of teaching. On standardised reading tests our children were a year ahead, and best of all, there were very few underachievers.

In the 1980s, most schools in the UK followed the ‘Real Book’ approach, where children use readers from the start and are expected to work out themselves how the letters make up words. At our school we did not go down this route. We spent our time developing and improving the phonic method of teaching that had brought us such good results. Results in other schools started dropping but our results stayed high.

Having worked as a teacher, a publisher and an author of ELT materials for young children, I have learnt that the key to making English lessons successful for young learners is to provide them with a variety of enjoyable and age-appropriate activities such as stories, songs and chants, and active games. It was because of my experience in developing and writing ELT materials that I was introduced to the team at Jolly Learning with a view to developing Jolly English, a course that would teach young learners some basic English in preparation for using Jolly Phonics . Writing the course was a really enjoyable experience as it enabled me to bring together the ELT methodology with which I was familiar, with the added challenge of developing children’s phonemic awareness and introducing them to all the key letter sounds in preparation for using Jolly Phonics. I really hope that teachers and children will find the course as enjoyable to use as I did to write.