Friendly Phonics 4: Tricky Sounds

Friendly Phonics 4 – Tricky Sounds - completes the Friendly Phonics apps quartet by professional artist and educationalist, Dawn Matthews.

Let me introduce you to another cool Friendly Phonics App –Tricky Sounds. This app works in the same simple way as the other three, but all images, voices and sounds are completely different.

The four Friendly Phonics apps together form a quartet of apps that completes the Curriculum of letter, digraph and trigraph sounds, word building, blends, the silent “e” rules, as well as breaking down/building words using syllables - in English. Although initially designed to help students with learning differences in the primary level of education, all students of any age or culture seem to love these apps. They also cover, the use of pronouns (very different in English from many other languages) in a happy, simple and addictive way.

This, the last, focuses on the surprising, the weird, the beautiful and the cute, with over 30 different face images appearing as each sound is completed, together with 20 new animations. Whilst you will recognise many of the excellent voice technicians from the first three apps, more have been included on this, the slightly more adult app.

It would, of course, be impossible to include every spelling rule or sound in English, as there are hundreds of them, and far too many for our brains to manipulate correctly - so apps from now on will be focusing on the irregular or “stupid” words which will be taught in quite a different way.

As the apps progress from letter sounds, through to tricky sounds, the art changes from natural colours and shapes (an important part of vision training if the student is to appreciate colour and shape when an adult), to more sophisticated expressions and actions, to explore, empathise with, laugh at or just enjoy.

Learning to read: the myriad of varied expressions and body language in animals and more particularly in people is, in my opinion as essential in a student as learning to decode English.

Dawn firmly believes that,
“To teach is to learn twice”
- Joseph Joubert