The second instalment of Free Homeschooling Resources includes help with what I have found to be the key to many reading difficulties – lack of sufficient knowledge of vowel sounds.
Before my youngest child started school in the mid 1980s, the head of the infant school explained that they no longer taught children to sound out all of a word, but just to look at the first and the last letters and guess what was in the middle. About five years later, I had a group of year 7 students with serious reading problems that meant that they could not keep up with the class. When I investigated, I found the chief cause was that they did not know how to read and spell the vowel sounds in words. Times have changed since then, but this is still a key area of knowledge for learning to read successfully.
So, here are three more of my original programs that address and practise this and other key skills.
Victory Vowels teaches vowel sounds – a_e, e_e, ea, igh, oa, er, ir, ur, ar, or, oi, oy, ow … Memory aids, photos and video clips are included. (See below to download it.)
Ch and Friends does the same thing for consonant sounds – ch, sh, th, wh, ph, ng … (See below to download it.)
Phonic Comics 2 practises both of the above in interactive comic strips that use humour to retain interest and engagement. (See below to download it.)
These are truly free homeschooling resources – They are free to download. They are useful for homeschooling because they are engaging, don’t require parents to have technical knowledge to help their children become successful readers, allow children to progress at their own speed … They provide support and ideas for teachers who may have been suddenly thrown into organising homeshooling resources for their students.
Again, they are executables (.exe files) so you may get nasty-sounding messages. If this is a problem, I hope to have all of my programs available shortly to purchase very cheaply.
I hope these programs help you and your children. Feel free to share them, but not for sale. Here are the links to download the programs for free:
My apologies to anyone who downloaded the earlier versions. A technical error transferring these as simple files over the internet meant that each sound would only play once.
You can now download the updated versions for free by clicking here:
Victory Vowels Ch and Friends Phonic Comics 2.
Then click on DOWNLOAD ALL. Or right click on the folder name and choose “Download”. This may take a few minutes.
If a sign “leave” appears, click it. You will eventually find the file in your downloads folder. Right click on it and choose “Extract here” or “Unzip to here”. This will make a folder, e.g. Alphabet Album” in downloads. Move this to a convenient place. Open the folder, then double click on AlphabetAlbum.exe to run it, or make a shortcut to your desktop.
Feel free to share these as widely as you like, but not to sell them.
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