Jolly Phonics v Letterland

[Emmers]

Does anyone feel one is better than the other? My ds's nursery is teaching Letterland however nearly all Primary Schools in our area are using Jolly Phonics!

Ds1 has done JP, don't know letterland - how does that work?

Most of the threads of MN tend to prefer the Jolly Phonics method.

Letterland has become largely superseded by JP in schools and preschools as it was felt to be too character associated rather than phonic letter sound associated. It may be that the nursery still use it as it may still be more appealing to younger children to learn through the alliterative stories and it keeps JP fresh and new for when they go to school.

GDG - Letterland uses characters to make the letters more appealing although both are phonics based however Jolly Phonics seems to have the edge. LIZS is spot on with first comment about pre-schools and primarys and am aware of recent press reporting about phonics helping with reading ages.

Hi, dd's nursery use Letterland and dd knows all the characters but I would say that she doesn't understand sounds match the letters. If you ask her what sound her name begins with she will say 'Ellie Elephant' (or whatever character) rather the 'e'

I would say from what I have seen of jolly phonics that this does look slightly better but at 3 I'm not worrying too much about it. DD loves letterland and for me fun is the main thing atm!

Emmers - not sure what type of nursery your child visits or how old they are but thought I would mention that our nursery starts using Letterland for the very youngest - so dd is now 2.4 for example and uses Letterland in her room. When they move up to the more formal nursery / pre-school it appears that they swap things over to Jolly Phonics. It might be worth checking this is the same at yours.

Mo'H I think your dd illustrates why it has gone out of vogue, as the children effectively will have to unlearn that character association. Some chidren will find that harder to do than others and with the UK schools' pressure for early literacy there are time constraints on achieving this.

We started with Letterland as DS had real enthusiasm for it. For that reason I thought it was great for him at that age - about 2.6. However I don't honestly think he would ever have really learned to read from it as the characters seem too important IYKWIM. We moved onto Jolly Phonics 4 weeks ago at 3.1, we are just over half way through the 42 sounds and he is already reading appropriate 3 and 4 letter words. I'm really impressed with it and DS really enjoys it. Letterland is great for getting them interested in the first place though and the videos are good too.

Letterland is an older form of phonics teaching, when thorough knowledge of phonics was not prevalent. It bases its teaching from the letters of the alphabet rather than the sounds of the language. There are more sounds in our language than letters of the alphabet so this approach is limiting and requires too many 'rules' and 'exceptions' to be introduced to cope with all the 'extra' sounds that exist beyond the letters of the alphabet. It also encourages children to believe each letter has one sound, which makes introducing two letters making a different sound, and a letter making an alternative sound quite confusing and complex.

As already stated by some, many children do get very hung up on the characters than get the most out of their phonic associations. Not all children can make the association with intial sounds and to assume that this will help learn speech sounds is misleading. Also, speech sounds occur all through the word, so to feature mainly on the initial sounds is also limiting.

Jolly Phonics is a synthetic phonics scheme which is far more complete in exploring the speech sounds and all their related spelling patterns. It approaches from all the speech sounds first, with a story and action to help remember them - with no letter support at first; just hearing the sounds. Then, letters are matched to them and words are made using the sounds all through from the beginning to the end.

Jolly Phonics enables children to independently read unknown words very quickly. It is thorough and systematic - and huge fun! Children love the actions, pictures and stories but most of all, they love the fact they can read independently so quickly. This is the biggest motivator of all.

Letterland might be preferred by some but it's not necessarily just fun that teaches children to read. Some children are able to learn to read no matter how they are taught - some are justvery capable of working it out for themselves with mimimal initial knowledge and instruction.

But as far as choosing a method that will definitely teach all the required skills and knowledge in a fun, thorough and quick way and will definitely support all children in the long term regardless of if they are able or struggling readers, Jolly Phonics wins hands down.

There are of course plenty of others who think more highly of Letterland than i do and you may want to read this evaluation of it by the authors.

hmm. that didn't work. try again.

here

LIZS that's really interesting, I hadn't thought of it like that before. I think dd will struggle to unlearn the associations she has made! Am actually a little concerned now.

It's really sad when you see a 10 yr old with literacy difficulties, and in the middle of trying to spell something for you they start talking about 'Ellie Elephant' etc! I much prefer Jolly Phonics, although no system is perfect for every child - and I will be in no rush to begin my 2 on 'formal' literacy teaching anyway.......

Is Jolly Phonics boring, though? I haven't ever seen a JP book so don't know about it.
Someone gave us a Letterland book & DD (only 4) really loves it, she is genuinely interested in the characters. She remembers how to write the second letter in her name because it's Sammy Snake, and she spots Eddie Elephants or Oscar Oranges in other words, quite frequently nowadays. I can't see her getting anywhere as interested in a purely phonics system, unless there were cute little characters in it...

mszebra - JP has characters too - Inky Mouse and friends!

GDG read your emails!