Letter Land

mmouse

Hi, all mummies,

I am attending ETC's course of Phonics for Parents.  After I have read marieyuen's comment, I prefer to buy the Early Years Handbook as that is much cheaper and will have a lot more information in papers.  This is definitely more cost effective to read a book if you have time.

The course handout is only 1 or 2 pages for each lessons.  You have to drop down what the tutor teaches about the stories for all the phonics.  The teaching method is quite good so as the tutor.

I just bought the Alphabet song CD and have the same query about the different pronounication of "says" by the male singer and the female singer.  I just wrote an email to Letterland about this query yesterday, awaiting reply.  Besides, I also found some of the lyris on the CD print are wrong - the song of Golden Girl and Wicked Water Witch.  As the price of that CD is $120, I don't expect they have so many mistakes in production.

Dear marieyuen,

It is so good to see all your comments regarding Letterland which are very useful, especially the way you home-made the magnetics.

I also bought the cassette tape from Letterland.  You can try to record the tape to MD.  Then you can divide the MD according to the alphabet (if your hi-fi has that function), it will be easier for you to select the track.

mmouse

Hi all, I try to summarise what phonics and Letterland stories I have learnt from the 4 lessons as below:-

sounds of 26 alphabets in English (a-z)
hard and soft C
hard and soft G
bl, cl, fl, gl, pl, sl
br, cr, dr, fr, gr, pr, tr
sc, sk, sp, st, sm, sn, sw
scr, spr, spl, str
tw
ff, ll, ss, nd, nt, lk, lt
sh, ch, th, ph, gh, wh
short and vowel sounds
ay, ai, oa, ee, ea
silent magic e
vowel men in little words
y - long i sound/ long e sound
ar, or, er, ir, ur
aw, ow, ow, ew
au, ou
kn, ture, que
oi, oy
oo
syllables

Although the above list seems very long, but we don't have notes for all the Letterland stories for above.  So I don't think you can teach your kid just by attending this course.  That is why I agree with marieyuen about you have to buy the books in order to equip yourself with the teaching methods so as to teach your kid.  And you can refer to the books from time to time or you forget about the Letterland stories.

So in conclusion, it is very expensive to attend the course ($1200) compared with what you can learn from it.

Dear marieyuen,

I think it is very important to have the flash cards for some of the above phonics pattern, e.g. ch, sh, th...etc as the kid can associate the stories easily from the graphics on the flash cards.  Do you have those flash cards?  I check the price from ETC - $3xx for Programme 1 and another $3xx for Programme 2 flash cards, which I think too expensive.  Any comment about where I can scan those graphics?

Also, your suggestion for buying from ebay.co.uk is a very good experience.  Thank you.