Important: Lessons marked with an asterisk (*) are available for free tier members. For all other lessons, please ensure you have purchased a paid plan to access.
Example lesson
Introduction
Phonics sets the foundations for reading and is an essential part of any beginners ESL curriculum. The Abridge Academy Phonics Course is intended to provide more guided phonics training, with the specific needs of students for whom English is a second language in mind.
Using our interactive slide format, these lessons incorporate fun games, activities, songs, video clips and more to make learning phonics fun!
- Designed for 25 minute lessons
- Interactive slides format
- (Coming soon) flashcards and homework worksheets for each lesson
- Focuses specifically on phonics and vocabulary building
- Suitable for young learners with an A1-A2 English level
Curriculum structure
The phonics course is currently only partially complete, and more lessons will be added later in the year. Abridge Academy’s curriculum will be organised into the following levels:
- Level 1: letters, initial sounds and CVC words
- Level 2: digraphs and initial/ final blends
- Level 3: long vowels, vowel teams and r-controlled vowels
- Level 4: prefixes and suffixes
We are currently working on revamping level 1 of this phonics course to follow a more synthetic phonics teaching approach, with fun themes for each lesson as well as more focus on blending / segmenting sounds and decoding / encoding words.
Teaching tips
- We opted to offer this phonics curriculum separately from the main core curriculum to give you more flexibility as to when and how to teach phonics to your students. Phonics shouldn’t be the very first thing new ESL learners study, but instead something gradually taught alongside the A1 and A2 levels.
- These lessons all have a similar structure and format. We would recommend therefore that you do not teach them all in one continuous block of classes, instead mix and match them up with core curriculum classes, to avoid learner fatigue.
- For more advanced students or those whose native language is phonetically similar to English, you may wish to just pick out the review lessons of this phonics curriculum to consolidate their skills.
- This course is not suitable for particularly young students (approximately under the age of 3) who do not have a basic familiarity with the concept of phonemes and graphemes (being able to represent a sound with a letter or combination of letters) in their own language. Instead, you should look for a curriculum focusing on developing fundamental phonemic awareness first.
Are there no previews/ homework available for the Phonics 1 course? Also, only one lesson for Phonics 2? Is that right?
Hi Jen! Homework worksheets are now available 😀 Once phonics 1 is complete, I’ll then move on to adding more to phonics 2 – the curriculum is still a work-in-progress at the moment! That first lesson in phonics 2 is there to give you an idea of what the lessons will be like 🙂 Hope this helps! Katie
Is it me, or is the there no sounds with these slides?
Hi John, thanks for the message! Sure, these lessons are designed to be used in live classes. The listening activities have audio (see the slide instructions), but for other activities the teacher should help the student produce the sounds in class. I hope this helps! ~Katie
Hi there Katie,
My name is Gladys I just purchased the Ultimate curriculum it charged me but is not allowing me to have access it keeps saying this content is for core curriculum and ultimate curriculum Members only. I emailed you from the original email that I paid with so then I changed my email thinking that was a problem and I still have no access to it. Please help me I would have greatly appreciated thank you!!
Hi Gladys, sorry to hear about this issue. I have replied to your email with steps to resolve this 🙂 Katie
Thank you Katie for your patient and quick response and helping me solve my problem. After all the problem was my quick fingers. Thanks again!! Loving the curriculum.:) Thank you for all your hard work!
No problem, I’m glad you were able to resolve it! Thanks for being a valued member of the Abridge Academy curriculum 🙂 Katie
I just started as a free member to try out the content, but unfortunately, I cannot access the free courses.
Hi Kimberly, please see the items marked with a * in the menu above – these are in the free plan. Alternatively, return to your dashboard where you’ll find some quick links to the free lessons 🙂 I hope this helps! ~Katie
Hi Katie! I hope you are well! Do you have an idea of when in the year the rest of the phonics course will be available? Many thanks!
Thanks for the message! Apologies, the phonics course has ended up being put on a bit of a backburner for now – there is a LOT of work needed to make it a more complete phonics curriculum, and the focus at the moment is on the main core curriculum. There is some more phonics content being added to level 1 of the core curriculum though, the idea being that students whose native language has very different sounds/ alphabet to English could complete a “level 0” beginners course focusing on initial consonant sounds and short vowels (a revamped version of this phonics course, with more phonemic awareness activities and a different structure rather than just the alphabet) then move to the main core course, which would allow them to learn the remaining phonics skills more gradually alongside oral English lessons.