Jolly Phonics Fun

We do our Jolly Phonics lesson in the mornings. Each child gets a whiteboard, marker and duster and comes to the mat. We then write a letter sound down on the top of the board such as the blended sound ‘ai’. The teacher chooses a word. Sometimes they need to ‘unjumble’ a nonsense word to make a real word that the teacher has written on the board. For instance the nonsense word ‘arin’ becomes the real word “rain” when ‘unjumbled’. 

Most often during these lessons we use “arm blending” to sound out a word the teacher has given. In arm blending the first sound is on the shoulder, middle sound on the elbow and last sound on the hand. So the word coat can be sounded out on the arm as ‘c’- ‘oat’- ‘t’ …coat. Once the students have sounded out the word together on their arms they are now ready to write the word.  

Sometimes we put in sound buttons under the words. Single sounds get one dot below and blends get a line underneath. For example the sound buttons for the word coat would be ( . _ . ) .

We then write a sentence using the word. Sometimes the students have to ‘unjumble’ a sentence and sometimes they write their own sentence. When the students are finished they hold up their boards for the teacher to see and the teacher gives guidance about correct spelling of words and punctuation.

The students find these lessons very rewarding, because even more complex words can be easily sounded out using the arm blending technique. For longer words we use put the sounds in between the shoulder and elbow or between the elbow and hand. For example, the word “throat” will have the letter ‘r’ occurring between the shoulder and elbow and the word “sound” would have the letter ‘n’ occurring between the elbow and hand.

The students always feel a great sense of accomplishment as they begin writing words they could never have dreamed of writing before. They really love showing off their work on their whiteboards to both their teachers and friends and we always end up having a lot of Jolly Phonics fun.

Bronwen Nuthall
Reception Year teacher