Reviews of Songbirds Phonics
"An excellent full range of phonic usage for these stages of text. I feel children would benefit immensely from the scheme."
St Nicholas Primary School, Oxford
“Songbirds were an instant choice to support Early Reading in our school. Their colourful illustrations and variety of characters provide just the motivation our children needed. Julia Donaldson is a celebrated author which the children enjoy so an all round must. Worth every penny.”
Lydlynch Primary School, Hampshire
“Colwich has recently begun using Songbirds as part of our guided reading times. The children were immediately enthusiastic when they realised the books were written by Julia Donaldson as The Gruffalo is a big favourite of ours. In a short time we are already reaping the rewards with children being successful readers at a very young age! The colourful pictures, decodable text, and enjoyable storylines are adding up to a keenly anticipated reading time.”
Colwich Primary, Staffordshire
"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-ROMs cover 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.
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."
