Barbara Neely received her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley, along with her General Elementary Teaching Credential. She has a Master’s degree in reading and language arts and Reading Specialist Credential, which she earned at California State University, Hayward. She has been in education more than 30 years and was named Reading Specialist of the Year for Alameda County, California in 1993.She has had extensive training in early literacy and is familiar with the latest research in reading acquisition and language arts. Her main focus has been teaching beginning reading and remediating reading difficulties. As a mentor teacher and language arts coach, she has assisted many teachers in the use of the latest reading strategies, especially phonics. She has developed and used this phonics program successfully with all sorts of learners for most of her career.

A failure-proof method for teaching phonics at home.

No experience necessary! The 378 page guidebook takes you step by step through each of the 40 lessons, with scripted ready to use lessons featuring a “Do” and “ Say” format using the direct teaching of letter/sounds for short vowels, consonants, long vowels, Bossy R and inflectional endings; also, instruction in blending sounds and the decoding process; additional practice reading books with decodable text, also spelling, building and sorting words.

Phonics Magic is a muti-sensory approach to phonics that includes a unique dictation process in which students make words by manipulating letters and sounds.

A child with average ability can be making words after the sixth lesson and reading stories after lesson 11

Phonics Magic is a program that can be successfully used by anyone who wants to teach beginning reading. Previous experience in teaching phonics is not necessary, as the entire program is scripted for the teacher. The format is repetitive and easy to follow. Suggested materials can be easily obtained for little or no cost. A non-reading student with average ability being guided by this program can be reading fluently before all forty lessons have been taught. Phonics Magic is a program that can be successfully used by anyone who wants to teach beginning reading.

Children are introduced to each letter/sound by a cute story character. Students learn a physical signal to prompt them to remember the sound being taught. Patterns are included for students to make a stick puppet to represent each letter/sound. These stick puppets can be used for practice in blending and making words. We begin with the five short vowels and then add one consonant at a time, with practice in blending after each one. Students will be making words and reading books with decodable text by lesson 12.

Students will become phonemically aware of letter/sounds and therefore be able to reproduce them from memory, using metacognition in a unique dictation process, where students will change one letter/sound at a time to make a new word. All words needed are available in sequential order for the teacher to use. The program contains easy to administer pre-tests and activities to check and practice letter/sound knowledge in blending and segmentation.

Lessons are taught in a sequential order, with one concept building on the next, and contain lots of review and practice activities. The 378 page guidebook is completely self-contained. You do not have to go out and purchase anything except what is on the materials needed list. The guidebook is divided into nine sections covering 40 lessons: Overview, short vowels, consonant, long vowels, digraphs, Bossy R, inflectional endings, additional vowel sounds, and appendix. Each lesson can be divided into smaller segments, depending on the attention span of the student. Sight words are gradually added in each lesson, when needed for the stories to make sense. The appendix lists all sight words used in each lesson, patterns for pocket spellers, thinking hats and stick puppets. It also contains a glossary of phonics terms used in this program.

Each lesson features

“Materials Needed” section so that the teacher can gather and prepare materials needed prior to the lesson.

• A (story) and (story character) to introduce each letter/sound.
• A large picture and small (stick puppet) of the story character.
• A (poem) or chant about that character and the sound it makes.
• A physical signal to trigger student’s memory of each letter/sound.
• An explanation of mouth movements for students who have difficulty pronouncing the letter/sound.
• An illustrated (fold-up story) to practice the letter/sound just learned.
• Encoding and decoding practice, phonemic awareness , blending and segmentation are embedded in the program.
• Individual pocket spellers
• Practice in using metacognition with dictation.
• Sight words listed at the beginning of each lesson.
• upplemental activities for additional practice

Most materials needed for each lesson are readily available around the house or very inexpensive to purchase.

• A small white board or chalkboard for student to use during dictation practice
• Dry erase pens or chalk
• A larger white board or chalkboard for teacher
• Something to point at words with (a pencil is fine for this)
• Photo copy of the target large picture of the story character to show while telling the story.
• Photo copy of target stick puppet, craft sticks for puppets
• Photo copy of poem for each story character
• Photo copy of fold-up story
• Blank journal for recording words made and for writing sentences.
• Blank 3X5 cards for recording new words for practice
• Poster board to record each letter/sound as it is learned
• Definitions below: - can be attached to links in green.

LETTER/SOUNDS:

Sounds that are made from the letters in a word.
The word ‘man’ has three sounds: /m/-/a/ /n/’
The word ‘ship’ has three sounds: /sh/-/i/-/p/.
The word ‘bandit’ has six sounds: /b/-/a/-/n/-/d/-/i/-/t/.

See phonemic awareness

BLENDING:
Combining consonants and vowels
Example: m-a-t = mat

DECODABLE TEXT:
text that contains only the letter/sounds previously learned.

MULTI-SENSORY:
Using four of the five senses: seeing, saying, hearing and touching when remembering letter/sounds.

Students go through these four steps when recalling letter/sounds when responding to dictation .This process is called Metacognition .

METACOGNITION:
Meta= me, cognition= thinking about thinking
“Me thinking about thinking”
The teacher dictates a word for student to write.

Using Metacognition:

1. The student sees the word
2. The student says the word
3. The student hears the word
4. The student writes the word

SEGMENTATION:
 Taking words apart, or spelling. In the dictation process. Students spell by segretating, or separating, each letter/sound and reproducing it.

DECODING:
Student looks at each letter/sound in a word and blends it with the next.
Example: pa – pas – past.
The first two sounds in a word should be said together, because it is too difficult to say them separately.

ENCODING:
Sometimes called segmentation or spelling. The student listens to a word, thinks about the individual sounds or phonemes in that word and then thinks through each sound in order to write it. See Phonemic Awareness.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS:
The same as encoding. The student can listen for and detect each letter/sound or phoneme in a word.
Example: The word cat has three phonemes = c-a-t.
The word night also has three phonemes= n-i-t
The word dump has four phonemes = d-u-m-p 
The student must be able to tell each SOUND s/he HEARS in a word, not the letters s/he sees.
The student must be able to listen to a word that is said slowly in parts, such as the word “p/….arty” or the word “m/….an” and tell you what it is by putting it back together or blending the sounds.

Conversely, the student must also be able to take words apart, or segment words by telling you the SEPARATE SOUNDS s/he HEARS in the word. Example: In the word ‘camp’ the student must be able to tell you that the sounds s/he hears are /C/A/M/P/. Remember, the student must tell you the letter sounds, not the letter names.

DICTATION PROCESS:
The student looks, listens , repeats and writes the sounds s/he hears in dictation. There are five types of changes in the dictation process:

1. SUBSTITUTION of letter/sounds. This is an excellent way to check letter/sound knowledge in the beginning,middle and final position in a word. It is also a great way to review and check retention of the letter/sounds that have already been introduced. Example: By changing just one letter, change the wordcatto fat. Next change fat to hat, hat to mat, mat to map, etc.

2. ADDITION of a letter/sound to an existing word: Example: change pet to pets; change top to stop, etc.

3. INSERTION of a letter/sound to an existing word: Example: Change pet to pest; Change mat to mast, etc.

4. REVERSAL of a letter/sound in an existing word: Example: Change pat to tap; Change pets to step, etc.

5. DELETION of a letter/sound in an existing word: Example: Change pest to pet; Change stop to top, etc.

VOWELS: 
The vowels are the letters a,e,i,o,u and sometimes y. Each vowel has two basic sounds: long and short.

The short vowels sound as they do in the following words:

/a/ as in cat

/e/ as in pet/ 

/i/ as in tip

/o/ as in pot’ 

/u/ as in pup

The long vowels sound as they do as you say them in the
alphabet.

CONSONANTS:
All the letters of the alphabet other than vowels. Consonant sounds are fairly consistent.

DIGRAPHS:
Vowel digraphs are double vowels that do not follow the long vowel rules.
Some examples are: good, fool, weather, pause, fawn, and weight.
Consonant digraphs are two or more consonants that are sounded together to make one sound as in thumb, then, wheel, shell, chin, and know.

INFLECTIONAL ENDINGS:
Endings such as ‘er’, ‘ed’, and ‘ing’ that are attached to the ends of base words that may change the meaning of the word.

SIGHT WORDS: 
Frequently used words that are not sounded out phonetically.

These will be taught in the context of the sentences and stories. A student must see and use these words often to memorize them.

BASE WORD: 
A word that can stand by itself. These can be made into new words by adding suffixes, or endings, and prefixes, or beginnings,

as in: unwrap, rewind, sadness, swimming, camper.

MERRY MOUSE

Merry Mouse lived in a little house in the woods.  Most of the time she was alone.  No one ever came to visit her.  She had no friends.  All the other animals in the woods played together and had a lot of fun.  Merry Mouse just watched them from here kitchen window.  Maybe she didn’t have any friends because she was not always nice to others.  Some people just don’t like mice, you know!  Sometimes she would try to make them let her play, but they just told her to go away.  Sometimes she would kick and hit others because she was mad at them for not being her friend.  And sometimes she would take things that didn’t belong to her.

            One day, Fuzzy Duck was having a party.  He invited Tommy Turtle, Baby Bunny, Squeeky Squirrel, and Calico Cat.  He did not invite Merry Mouse.  Everyone came to the party, and Merry Mouse hid behind a tree to watch.  Pretty soon she saw something delicious in the window of Fuzzy Duck’s house.  It was an apple pie that Fuzzy Duck had set there to cool.  Merry Mouse sneaked around so no one could see her. She jumped up to the windowsill and had a feast of apple pie while the others were outside playing games.  She said,  “This is /m/m/m/m/m/ good!”  Then she ran home.  She was very happy because she went to Fuzzy Duck’s party after all.

POCKET SPELLERS
Student can manipulate letter/sounds to make new words changing just one letter/sound at a time.

THINKING HATS
A hat that the student can make following step by step instructions to go with metacognition.

 

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