For February Half Term in Frome Library, Sasha and I had the mission of bringing to life the games in the new Break 3 family reading guide, we decided to play some www.666casino.com games at the end as well. We both knew, as parents how easy it is to get a helpful little booklet and file it away rather than play.

As we started planning our workshop, I realised my own lack of knowledge about phonics, even though as a parent I remember my children practising their different sounds.

Hopefully the reading guide will help other parents similar to me.

My journey into phonics resulted in the ‘Sound machine’. A bizarre looking box with strange tubes and trumpety things protruding from it, and sounds written all over it. I wanted to start with play and explore these different sounds in an abstract sense; to make up words and strange sentences, giving children a chance to think about communication from it’s basic beginnings and the relationship between the written and verbal.

(Or rather have a lot of noisy fun!).

Yes it’s true Sound Machine could drive you mad with all that enthusiastic sound making, BUT we found with the addition of a conductor a sound symphony was born!

Gobbler was also very popular with its teeth chomping up and down on phonic ‘objects’. At our Saturday workshop children made their own out of boxes, and some began creating phonic food, such as things with an ‘s’ or an ‘oo’.

The Break 3 family reading guide was created with Frome Community Learning Partnership, with helpful comments from children, teachers, parents and librarians, and lovely illustrations from Sid, Louis and Daisy. The guide is being circulated to all Key Stage 2 children in the Frome area schools, and we’ll be bringing Gobbler, Bingo and the Sound Machine to village schools clusters later this year.