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To Teachers who already teach Systematic Phonics
One of the major frustrations I encountered when running Basic Concern (my privately run learning centre) was the task of
a) finding suitable resources and
b) trying to marry the different resources together
The commercial work sheets:
* rarely followed the same sequence of sound in their presentation
* tended to be fragmented - eg - a worksheet on each sound - 'ai' today - 'ow' tomorrow (providing no follow on consolidation)
* rarely included conventions like punctuation (separate worksheets had to be sought - and when found on the bookshelves they rarely matched the level I was working at)
* were frequently based on the ‘assumption’ that the student had prior knowledge of difficult concepts
I found this entire process frustrating, time consuming and less than ideal for the student or myself.
The Phonics Unlimited series was developed out of that practical need for a programme that was all-inclusive, that ‘married’ the learning of letter sounds and letter combination sounds with word blending, sight words, homophones, sentence construction, comprehension and written conventions such as punctuation. At the same time it needed to be fully structured and sequenced with inbuilt consolidation. With this resource as a base, worksheets from other resources became more useful, providing extra practice or consolidation as required.
Further, the Phonics Unlimited series is flexible in that it offers you the capacity to work with mixed groups of varying levels of ability. You can teach the same sound patterns with 3 different levels of ability, offering easier tasks for the struggling student while pushing the boundaries of the average learners and providing a suitable challenge for the more able students.
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