The Happy Learner

I am excited about this post as we have really enjoyed these activities in the lead up to Easter and I can see us continuing playing them long after Easter has finished. The games focus on identifying long vowel sounds and blending letter sounds to make a word. A friend recently asked me for ideas on how … [Read more...] about Easter Phonics Ideas

All of my blog posts so far have been about phonics. This is mainly because there are not many parent friendly phonics sites around and it is the one question I get asked a lot from friends. However I know that Maths is an area that some children can find hard to understand and sometimes it is hard to … [Read more...] about Maths-Simple addition and subtraction

Learning to read is a complicated and long process. We have to understand that these black squiggles on paper actually mean something, and then when the black squiggles are put together in different ways they make words. When a child learns to read they have to first identify the letters, then blend them … [Read more...] about The ‘reluctant’ reader and how to help.

One area of phonics that the rules do not apply is 'tricky' words or 'high frequency words'. We nickname them 'tricky' because they cannot be sounded out and just need to be learnt. Schools do this in a variety of different ways, a lot of the time your child will be given a set list of words to learn at … [Read more...] about Top tips for learning ‘tricky’ words and keeping it fun!

All three of our children love playing with the ball pool, we play with it both inside and outside and all year round so I decided to make some phonics games using the ball pool or the balls from it. We have a ball pool that I bought from Morrisons in the sale last summer and a couple of bags of balls to … [Read more...] about Phonics games using the ball pool

Learning phonics definitely does not have to be all about sitting down at a table with a pencil in hand, in fact I would say a large proportion of phonics learning can be done in an active way. In my experience more reluctant learners prefer active learning and will also be keen to join in and have a go … [Read more...] about Getting active with phonics!