Home ed days: learning to read with Songbird phonics

So, like I said the other day, The Book People had a sale on. Which was cruel of them. (Newsflash: Tuesday 10th until midnight, click here to use SHELL10 for 10% off your order! since released a new discount code of 5% off sales over £35, just use AFPEACH)

So I ordered Songbird Phonics, a reading scheme written by Julia Donaldson, and also a pack of Walker Stories, which I had some idea I could partly use as prizes.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to buy something else to use as prizes, these are such a fab collection there’s no way I’m giving any of them away!

Today Smallest has picked her way through Top Cat, the first of the songbird phonics books. I remember Small learning to read with these, right after Stile trays, and before his brief flirtation with ORT, before he gave up on all of that and headed for Harry Potter. I think it may take Smallest a little longer to crack it all – I don’t think she’s currently got the motivation he had, although it may well be coming. But she is getting the hang of most letters, beginning to blend, and does recognise words repeated from page to page. So, a good start.

And after she’d read that, I read Handa’s Surprising Day (Walker Stories) and Jack’s Little Party (Walker Stories). These are just great. They are small format, so the bag of 30 is quite portable, but each book has three stories in it. The illustrations are black and white, but they’re still beautifully detailed. I am a little confused, as we have Handa’s Surprise which is one of the stories in Handa’s surprising day, and I’m sure it’s not quite as detailed as in this book – I’ll have to dig it out and check.

(Rather than buying the books individually from Amazon via the affiliate links above, why not check out the entire 30 book collection of Walker stories for £15. (Yes this is also an affiliate link, but to the Book People. Books….)

Ahem. Enough of the subliminal advertising. 😉

Reading. Even though at the moment mostly what I’m doing is sleeping, and I’m very grateful that Big can cook (spaghetti bolognese for tea tonight, yum) we are still fitting in those little bits of home education that can be done quietly sitting down. So there’s our home ed days update. For more regular photographic input, check out the #100homeeddays tag on a variety of social networks – I’m tending to use instagram, but I’ve seen them on fb and twitter as well.

I will attempt to do a 300 Picture books update some time this week, if I can stay awake long enough (touch wood the headache is *finally* wearing off tonight) but blogging may be a little hit and miss for a while. Bear with me.

Linked up with #homeedlinkup – see the other posts here