Phonic Faces are Great in my Classroom!
I really love using the Phonic Faces cards. I use them in conjunction with our other phonics programs (Project Read and Spelling Through Phonics) and they help all children understand the lessons! They are great, especially with long and short vowels. I am teaching them to the whole class and they are helping even my strong readers. They all love doing the baby vowel and grown-up vowels sounds. This class is catching on to the long vowels faster than any class I ever taught. Also I think the pictures are awesome even for the readers who already know all of their letters and sounds. We were reading a story that had the word “ceiling” and a student said, “Look, it’s like on the girl’s pigtails, where the c has the /k/ sound and the /s/ sound.” Don’t you love it?? I will always incorporate Phonic Faces into my first grade classes from now on. I am so excited about the new books to go along with the cards!
Grace Savoie,
First Grade Teacher
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Phonic Faces Compliment Other Programs!
Let me be specific about what I love about the program:
I’m using Phonic Faces in conjunction with some of the techniques I’ve used with the LiPS program in both my speech/language classroom and in the 5 Kindergarten classrooms I collaboratively teach in each week. I have 12 kindergarteners on my caseload this year and wanted to introduce the kindergarten teachers to teaching techniques and language that more closely links speech sound production knowledge (which most of the Kindergarteners have) with letter name and sound knowledge (THE major achievement in the kindergarten curriculum.) I’ve used the LiPS program for several years and I like the “discovery” process the program uses and the way it develops a set of words that describe what my student’s mouths are doing when they produce speech sounds. I was looking for something that did a better job of linking the visual LETTER with the sound and was very excited to hear about Phonic Faces! Phonic face letter cards help cue information about the name of the letter and how to say the letter’s sound in a manner that my students are able to remember and use. The storybooks extend the information presented and allow additional practice with visually recognized the letter, naming the letter, and producing the letter sound contributing to a stronger ability to recall the letter and sound. My student’s enjoy meeting the Phonic Faces characters. In our district, our Kindergarten curriculum is based on the Land of the Letter People. In the lessons the kindergarten teachers and I teach collaboratively each week, our Phonic Face characters are the Land of the Letter People’s special friends. We’re just covering our first vowel sound (a) and the teacher’s are very interested in the concept of baby sounds and grown-up sounds. It’s so much more concrete and in keeping with our student’s life experiences than the long/short methodology. My kindergarten teachers are seeing the benefit of teaching letter names and sounds using specific vocabulary to describe the manner and place of production. I’m hoping to enhance my speech/language student’s success within their classroom as well as increase phonological awareness and speech articulation skills. Thank you for providing such an inspired teaching tool!
Sherri Hole
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Storyboards for Math and More!
My mom called this morning to tell me that she used the storyboard that I loaned her for a math lesson last week. The students were assigned to small groups to use the board to create math story problems and absolutely loved it. She mentioned how creative the students were in developing a story around math concepts (i.e., problem: when Joshua and Rickey around the ticket counter, they discovered they only had $35.00, but the tickets were $40.00; solution: Since they did not have enough money, Rickey called his brother to bring him $5.00, etc.) She said that as the students were completing the lesson, the Reading teacher walked in and asked about the paper storyboard and the wooden board. Mom asked for the website and she is going to share it with the teacher. The storyboard works with every subject!
Erica Dinkins
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Pre-K, K, ESL and More!
My school district (north of Dallas) recently purchased 8 sets of Phonic Faces and we are having great results with our students! Your work first attracted my attention in 1993 with the publication of Whole Language Intervention (Singular Publishing), and your articles which followed have always been on my must-read list. After reading a piece by Jan Norris in Topics in Language Disorders on applying the SDS framework to early literacy and phonemic awareness, I was convinced that this approach was exactly what we needed in our reading program.
The Pre-K and K teachers here are especially pleased that Phonic Faces is enabling our at-risk population to succeed. We have an especially high number of ESL students, and have seen an improvement in their performance already. Our end-of-year testing data for all at-risk students will be compared with previous years, and I feel confident that we will show a significant improvement.
Please email any outcome data that might be helpful in future presentations that I will be making to my district for placing the program in additional classrooms (we are a rapidly growing district). Thanks very much, and I will keep you updated on our success with Phonic Faces.
Sincerely,
Bill Blaine
