Oxford Reading Tree eSongbirds Phonics

overview

eSongbirds is creatively linked from Stages 1+ to 6 of the Oxford Reading Tree. It applies a multi-sensory approach to deliver systematic sessions of synthetic phonics: consonant clusters, sound segmentation and blending. The CD-ROM covers the National Curriculum Strategy - Word Level requirements for Key Stage 1. It includes all 44 phonemes and a range of appropriate activities to practise and develop new reading skills and contextualise phonic learning, thus increasing comprehension of the written word. eSongbirds contains a wealth of unique material designed to make literacy lessons fun, more interactive and encourages to children to make use of the motivational programme and activities independently.

It offers colourful animation, clarity of sound and an array of activities that help to link letter patterns and sounds in a memorable way to match, compliment and help develop fluency and literacy abilities.

Each of the 36 eSongbirds books offer a clear phonic unit of work and is supported by extension activities, all of which are animatedly explained by Songbird who is on hand to offer support and encouragement. There are three main categories of extension activities for for Stages 1+ through to 6 in each story: ’Which One’ has a focus of six tasks, which segment sounds within key words; ’Finish It’ matches phonemes and letter patterns; while ’Phoneme Frame’ offers six tasks to help in the recognition of sound blending to the construction of words.

Overall, this is a very flexible phonic programme and provides the basis for high quality, whole-class whiteboard lessons. However, it is equally a valuable program to be used by individuals for ‘stand-alone’ activities, partner or small focus group tasks to reinforce a specific aim. There is a useful interactive whiteboard range of tools, which are easy and fun to use. Just a few minutes practice at home allowed me to impress the class by highlighting and making changes to the text, add a ‘sticky note’ to the page or hide the text to add my own thought and speech bubble. This activity proved to be very popular - particularly as they could use the illustrations as prompts for writing their own version of the story, thus encouraging ‘authorship’ in them all.

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