Jolly Phonics and Grammar ~ Review

Quinton has been excited to start school with his new phonics books from jollyliteracy.com. Jollyliteracy.com’s parent company is just2ducks LLC. For this review, we received the Jolly Phonics Phonics Student Books 1, 2, and 3 as well as the corresponding Teacher’s Book. We also received Jolly Grammar 1 Pupil Book, Teacher’s Book and the Jolly Song book and CD.

Jolly Phonics Book 1 is devoted to introducing the 42 most common sounds in the English language. The student learns one way to write each sound and how to recognize each letter. There is a story for each sound introduced to help the student listen for that sound. Also a letter sound action is introduced which helps the student to remember the sound. In the daily word bank, the student also has practice blending words from the sounds they are learning.

The Teacher’s Book provides a section purely devoted to explaining the Jolly method of phonics. The daily guidance for the lessons in books 1, 2 and 3 are also color coded so that you can easily tell where the instruction for each student book begins and ends. The Teacher’s Book also has the daily instructions for each lesson; this includes:

• the sound story,
• the action associated with the sound,
• instructions for teaching the child to properly write the letters
• directions for blending the sounds that the student is/has learned
• sounding (saying the words that correspond to the pictures in the student book
• word bank words
• dictation-calling out the sounds that the student has already learned so that he/she can write them and
• further ideas (i.e. using Jolly Jingles or Jolly songs, Wall Frieze, and hands on activities.
• Books 2 and 3 also include reading sentences.

The Teacher’s Book for Jolly Grammar is set up much like the Phonics Teacher’s Guide. The first part of the book introduces the teaching method for Jolly Grammar. Jolly Grammar is designed to be used twice a week for 36 weeks. Some of the grammar lessons introduced in Jolly Grammar include:

• Weekly spelling lessons
• Proper nouns
• Common nouns
• Pronouns
• Alphabetical order
• Adjectives
• Verbs
• Adverbs and more

There are 40 tracts on the Jolly Songs CD. The lyrics to each song along with the suggested actions for the songs are included in the Jolly Songs book. The songs are written to familiar tunes such as Farmer in the Dell, Skip to My Lou, The Muffin Man, Camptown Races and Old McDonald.  The Jolly Songs have become quite popular at our house with the younger kids!

One of the great things about jollyliteracy.com is that the lessons are fairly short which is great for an active 5 year old boy! He has really enjoyed using these phonics lessons. I am looking forward to him using the Jolly Grammar book as well.  Jolly Phonics has been a good fit for Quinton.

Jolly Literacy would work well in both a homeschool and classroom setting. The added activities make it well suited for busy children.

Connect with Jolly Phonics and Grammar on these Social Media Links:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/jollyliteracy
Twitter: www.twitter.com/jollyliteracy
Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/jollyliteracy/

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Blessings,

Jennifer