Phonics ( basically teaching “ah, buh, cuh” instead of “Ay, Bee, See”) is becoming a worldwide pandemic at the moment. The UK & Australia have recently decided to bring it back on a national level, and in the States courses such as “Hooked on Phonics” are hugely popular. The idea being that if the kids can do the basic phonics they can read 80% of English. It might also surprise you to know that Genki Phonics is also huge in the US, I know it surprised me when I first found out! Thousands of parents in Japan also see phonics as the be all and end all of English learning, the magic bullet that will make their kids fluent. Hmmm….

Also since I introduced AJET’s Team Taught Pizza book for Junior High schools earlier in the year that also has become a slightly more limited, but still very big hit. So it was with great anticipation that last week I managed to get a look at the new AJET publication – Foxy Phonics, a worksheet based course for teaching Phonics in Junior High School. I knew straight away it was going to be a huge hit!

However when I saw the book last week for the first time, I must admit I was more than a little disappointed. The book looks very, very basic. The pictures are hand drawn and the page design was obviously done in Word, with horrible square boxes around everything. The choice of font wasn’t a particularly good one either. Certainly not the super book I was expecting. : (

But after actually reading through it ( as opposed to just flipping the pages), it does indeed fill a huge void in the materials currently available for Junior High School. I guess instead of a flashy maglev bullet train, it’s a subway car, which might not look pretty but certainly gets the job done very well. The 130 worksheets are tied in very nicely with the JHS textbooks, and the answer key at the back makes using them a doddle. They are going to help kids enormously in Junior High, and save a load of time for the teachers. The best bit I found though was the Japanese explanation at the beginning, just what you need to convince a doubting teacher! So as I wrote on the explanation page of the site, think “school like” rather than “genki” for the design and for 1,500 yen you will not be disappointed! www.FoxyPhonics.com

Update: As you may have seen we sold out of our first batch this week, but we will be having a big new delivery arriving tomorrow!