Material Detail

This website links to free lesson plans that clearly spell out teacher-led activities in phonics/phonological awareness with a thorough bibliography of reading research articles pointing to the effectiveness of such activities in children's learning. The lessons are presented with an assumption of a learning progression--that learners gain the skills one at a time and in a sequential order and are thorough in this regard. However, not every child in any given group will need the same amount of practice to master these isolated skills, and in the best outcomes, children would initiate word play themselves with the teacher as a facilitator. Teachers would do well to teach themselves the entire scope and sequence of activities to master the underlying principles--they are not difficult (how many units, add/subtract/substitute/switch a unit to see what happens...) and to then offer word or sentence play activities when children's attention is naturally focused on a particular word or sound pattern. As is true of all phonics materials I have seen to date, there is no reference to how different sounds are made in the mouth, with the voice. I would refer every user of phonics materials to a phonetics database such as "Sounds of Speech" on the University of Iowa website to get a better understanding of how contrasting sounds of English are produced.