Jolly Phonics - Is it me or is this wrong??

My eight year old daughter is one of those children who was really not ready for school and learning to read and write until the age of seven.  Unfortunately her confidence has been dented in the three years of schooling she has so far endured.


However, now some progress is being made, I purchased a Jolly Phonics Activity Book for her to do at home. It contains stickers which she just loves and a variety of fun activities.  I chose one which contained phonics that I know she has not yet managed to retain.  Now she is in year 3, apparently phonics are no longer used because of course they have already learnt them!


I was looking through it before showing her so I could be sure of what was required and make sure I could guide her to the activities she would enjoy, learn from but be achievable so we could boost her confidence when I came across the activity aimed at recognising the sound.


For the "ou" sound (think ouch), you are asked to draw a line from the pictures of things that contain the "ou" sound with the big "ou" letters in the middle.  That's all fine.  However, the pictures it contained were: "house", yep get that; "hedgehog", yep get that this is the one they have to realise doesn't contain the sound; and then "owl" and "cow"!  Yes they have the "ou" sound in them but they are clearly made by the letters O and W not O and U.


Now maybe it's just me, and I would very much like to hear other people's views, but surely this will then lead to my daughter being unable to read the word "cow" and trying to spell it "cou"??!!


Surely it is more beneficial to teach in a group all the phonics that will make the "ou" sound?  For example, focus on the "ou" sound for a length of time but teach that it can  be made by, "ou", "ow" and any other combinations of letters to make the same sound.


I'm now left unsure what to do and feel as though actually I can't use half of this book for fear of confusing my daughter further than she already is.  I am a teacher but at high school level so this really is not my field. I very much want to use a multi-sensory approach and have her make sounds out of a variety of materials etc.  Does anyone know of a better resource I could use to teach the phonic sounds in a more sensible, less confusing approach?  Surely I can't be alone in thinking this book is really taking the wrong approach?

The Light Between Oceans by M L Stedman

Available 26th April 2012. Published by Transworld Publishers.

Before this book comes out on sale, pencil it into a couple of free days in your diary because I promise you that you will not be able to put it down once you start.

The story revolves around the unlikely setting of a remote lighthouse on an otherwise uninhabited tiny island with the death and suffering of World War One as its backdrop.  The keeper Tom and his wife try and fail to have a baby until one day, one is washed ashore in a boat.  The father has died but the baby is very much alive.  Tom and Izzy stumble into a fateful decision that maps out bucket loads of heartbreak where no happy ending is ever going to be possible.

Right from page one, the characters and settings leap off the page...or rather you are flung into the heart of them.  Stedman is a remarkable writer who manages to carefully balance the utter beauty in her prose to avoid any hint of pretentiousness. Through economical smatterings of the most mesmorising imagery such as how Janus Rock, "dangled off the edge of the cloth like a loose button that might easilt plummet to Antartica", she makes every word count and before you know it, the characters and places are real and alive with only a little having been said about them.  Who ever thought a lighthouse could be a wonderful place to be?  Yet you find yourself there, feeling Tom's passion and care of the light; feeling as if you too are there being shown around by Tom himself.

As the characters and ever harsh landscape and weather become real and breath, so do the emotions and tragedies of the various characters in the novel.  I imagine some readers may decide the plot is predictable but this is part of the book's immense ability to break your heart.  You know that there can't be a happy ending; the author ensures you feel everyone's pain.  How many tears you cry, how often your heart is broken, the ebb and flow of emotions is the unpredictable plot.

Not many books reduce me to tears; the last one to do so was A Thousand Splendid Suns.  The Light Between the Oceans made me cry more. As the character of Ralph put it so eloquently "Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can't tell which is which until you've shot 'em both, and then it's too late".  The Light Between the Oceans is a tale of two good people who face those two tangled snakes that stubbornly refuse to be separated.

I can not praise this novel enough.  It is by far my favourite for some considerable time.  Make no doubt about it, it will become a film but no director or actor could ever come close to matching the magic that has been written.

It is even more astonishing that this is a debut novel.  I am already excited for the next.  Stedman is clearly one of those lucky devils that was born to write.