The KinderGenius™ program builds the foundation of reading at baby stage (1-2 years old). The next learning stage will be Jolly Phonics. See how this program teaches this K1 girl the principles of letter-sound relationships. The level of article she is capable of reading is of primary three level.
K1 Boy Reading
KinderGenius™ program builds the foundation of reading while phonics gives this K1 student the ability to recognize familiar words quickly as well as to figure out words he hasn't seen before (decoding). This K1 boy is reading a P3-level article.
K1 Boy Reading
A K2 student is reading a P3 level article after studying Jolly Phonics for 1 year.
In distinction from other language centres, rather than use one single approach to teach phonics, Jolly Kingdom integrates the methods of Synthetic and Analytic Phonics into a hybrid curriculum.
Synthetic Phonics teaches students the 44 basic units of sound, phonemes, before exposing them to full texts (part-to-whole learning). A traditional synthetic phonics approach would thus teach students individual phonemes, such as /s/, /a/, /t/, before introducing them to whole words. Students learn to blend these individual phonemes together to create, or synthesise, a word, e.g. 'sat'.
Analytic Phonics gives students whole words and teaches them to break the words into parts to analyse their patterns (whole-to-part). A traditional analytic phonics approach would thus teach students the word 'sing', which can be broken down into the consonant /s/ and the sound /ing/. By association, students are then taught to pronounce the words: 'wing', 'bring', 'thing'etc., so that they learn strings of rhyming words at a time.
By combining these two teaching methods, we believe our students will learn the accurate pronunciation and spelling of English words more efficiently and more effectively. Teaching a dual strategy for learning phonics, we more strongly equip our students to tackle the English language. This results in our students being able to read words that they know with fluency, and spell and pronounce words that they may not yet know with accuracy.
Research Focus
In a report commissioned by the American National Research Council in 2000 entitled 'Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children', a 17-member panel of reading experts recommended that both the Synthetic and Analytic Phonics methods be 'used together in a complementary fashion".
"We believe that children should be taught to use both processes, starting first with guided part-to-whole learning and progressing to interactive whole-to-part learning."
