Phonics Fun

Through 2 kids (and on my 3rd) we use a curriculum called Alpha-Phonics to teach reading. It's awesome-ly simple! I love it and would never use anything else (at least to start...I know that some kids need something different). I was told about it by a mom I babysat for when I was a teenager. She homeschooled her 5 children (for a period of time-not all the way) and they all learned to read with Alpha-Phonics. So, of course when I saw how simple it was and how colorful what everyone else was using was...what do you think I did? You would be right if you said I paid way too much money to get something fancier. That was with my first child. Within a week I threw it away (*gasp* I should've at least tried to sell it!) and went to look for the Alpha Phonics! Never looked back.
It is an old school primer that has no pictures. What I like about that is that I know the kids are not guessing at what they're reading, they have to read it. No clues from pictures. No pictures to distract!!
Haley is on lesson 14 and can read most words that have the short a sound already! And if you've ever read my blog before...Haley is not the easiest nut to crack.
Okay, now that I've sung the praises of my simpler than life phonics curriculum...I made something to go with it that turned out to not be quite so simple. But I love it too. It was a simple idea but I couldn't find what I needed to make it quite so simply. Very frustrating (and that happens to me all the time by the way, I will have THE best, easiest idea...except I can't find it anywhere). But I pressed on. What we have is what is pictured above. Think "Twister" meets phonics! We spread it out on the floor and I say...jump on the letter that makes the sound "duh" and Haley looks around and finds "D"! (We also used it for simple letter recognition before we were ready for the sounds.) She gets to be active and we are reinforcing what we're learning from the book. I also made some little laminated letters (lower case) that we can use like a matching game to match the lower case letter to the upper case!
I made mine using (cheap) scrapbooking paper and then I printed the simplest letters off on my Hallmark Card Studio on my pc, mixed them up on the squares...and put laminating shelf paper like stuff on it.