Phonic Limerick Friends

Phonic Limerick Friends is a fun, practical way to enhance children's phonic understanding and enable them to see phonic sounds in context. This resource contains 26 humorous limericks, one for each of the letters of the alphabet. Each short, funny poem features a cute alliterative character such as Alfie Ant or Zo Zebra. Children soon become familiar with these characters; it's very rewarding when they pick up a picture book to enthusiastically point out a Hannah the Horse word or an Alfie the Ant word. By showing phonemes in context in a funny little poem, rather than simply decoding a list of words, we are encouraging a love of reading from the very beginning - which is, of course, the reason we teach children to read in the first place! Children will enjoy and remember these amusing, creative limericks and this will help them internalise the link between the grapheme (what the letter looks like) and the phoneme (the letter sound). So when they see the letter 'j' they will think of Jenny the Jet, for example, and be able to visualise her jumping into a juicy jelly. The limericks also allow children to see and hear the phonic sound repeatedly in context. Each limerick contains at least 8 words containing the phonic sound that is being focused on, so for 'j', for example they see and hear: Jenny, jet, jumbo, jumper, jams, jiggles, jump, juicy, jelly.