Jolly Phonics Programme for Junior Infants

Junior Infant Homework (Information for Parents/ Guardians)

Dear parents/ guardians,

The junior infant pupils will begin the ‘Jolly Phonics’ programme on Monday 5th October. Here is an overview of what your child will be learning in the coming months, and the homework involved. All homework and notes will be in their Homework folder.

Letter Sounds: In Jolly Phonics, the 42 main sounds of English are taught, not just the alphabet sounds. For each sound there is an action and song which helps the children remember the sound the letter makes.

The letters are not introduced in alphabetical order. The first group will be ‘s,a,t,i,p,n’, as these letters make more simple three letter words than any other six letters. Please remember that the emphasis is on the letter sound, not the letter name- ‘s’ will be ‘ssssss.‘

Letter Formation: It is very important that your child holds the pencil correctly(froggy fingers- thumb and forefinger gently pinch the pencil and let it rest in the valley between those two fingers).The children will practice writing each new letter in school and this should be revised at home in their Practice copy. The written letter will correspond with the letter in the Sound Book.

Blending: As your child becomes more familiar with the letter sounds, she will receive word lists in her homework folder. Blending is a process of saying the sounds in a word and then putting them together to make a word e.g. c-a-t is cat. This technique, also known as ‘sounding out’ will be worked on daily in the classroom and will improve with practice. Please listen to your child blending the sounds to read the words on the list and then send it back into school. Once your child becomes confident with word lists and blending, she will receive a reading book. Please listen to her reading the given pages each evening and sign their reading record copy. It is important that your child understands what she has read. You can help by talking about the story/ pictures with your child.

Tricky Words: Some words cannot be sounded out or spelt correctly by listening for the sounds in them. These are called ‘Tricky Words’ and have to be learnt off. As your child becomes more fluent at reading and writing, she will be given a list of common Tricky Words to recognise by sight.

This all sounds like a great deal of work, but it happens in stages and is spread over a considerable period of time. There is no doubt that the effort on your part, at this early stage, is well worth it.

Click to watch an explanatory video about the programme and Homework

Jolly Phonics Songs

Games for Letter recognition and formation

Sound games