What is the right way of learning English? Enough has already been said and written about the short comings of rote learning – which is how most of us learnt the language – if this is not the right method – then what is right?

Language learning is meant to happen intuitively. How did we all learn our mother tongue? We learnt it by listening to the sounds around us; sounds are then translated into words; words then are strung together to make sentences. Fundamentally it is deciphering the sounds that helped us learn our mother tongue; if this is the intuitive and natural way of language learning, shouldn’t we apply the same principle to teach English to our children?

At Phonics Power this is exactly what we do; our basic phonics programme introduces the sounds of English through actions, songs, stories and dramatization. Our children are encouraged to apply their newly acquired sound knowledge to learn reading and spelling. Honing the listening skills is our first step – through listening to the sounds our children learn to read and spell; in the next years, they listen more to learn speaking and comprehension; all of this eventually lead to structural understanding of the language and result in independent writing.

Phonics is the science of learning various phonemes (sounds) in words and thus read and spell. For e.g: (/e/ is 'eh') and (/b/ is 'buh'). Teaching English reading using phonics requires children to learn the connections between letter patterns and the sounds they represent. The Children learn that the letter 'd ' has the sound of 'duh' as in 'dog'. They learn how to blend the letter sounds together (/duh- o-guh/) to make words like 'dog'. Phonics helps children crack the English alphabetic code easily so they will be able to read even unknown words.

Jolly Phonics is a synthetic phonics method of teaching children the alphabetic code of English. This multisensory method is specifically designed for young children aged between 4 to 6 years. Jolly Phonics was developed by two primary teachers Sue Lloyd and Sara Wernham and published by Jolly Learning Ltd., UK. It has an amazing collection of learning aids for pupils and teaching aids for teachers.

Jolly Phonics is a multi-sensory method used to introduce the letter sounds to the children. There is a storyline, action, song and work sheet for each sound. By doing an action associated with the sound, e.g., rub tummy and say “mmmmm” for the /m/ sound, the children remember it more easily.

Grammar is inevitable to read, write and speak good English, but at the same time it shouldn’t become boring for the kids. That is why Jolly Grammar makes key elements of grammar interesting for the children. Be it any of the topics like tenses, prepositions, articles, nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives or punctuations etc. Jolly Grammar leads the way in showing how grammar can be made fun. We use colour coding and actions to help children identify the parts of speech in sentences. Jolly grammar also enables children to spell and punctuate more accurately ,use wider vocabulary and have a clear understanding of how the language works.