When I took my Montessori training, my language instructor had a beautiful set of handmade phonetic sentence cards. The sentences were composed of mostly phonetic words (‘the’ and ‘a’ were the only sight/puzzle words used); the child would read the sentence and match it to the corresponding picture. Unfortunately, my exceedingly limited artistic skills prevented me from duplicating the lesson, and I have not found a set commercially available, despite the fact that I have several nascent phonetic readers who could benefit from such a work. So, you can imagine my delight when I off-handedly mentioned the work I had admired and my very talented assistant, Katie, surprised me with this set:
She illustrated 25 sentences (so we can rotate them out to keep the work fresh) with these adorable colored pencil illustrations.
Aren’t they perfect?
Needless to say, the children already love them! It is a great extension of phonetic reading; it is not quite as tiring for the new reader as attempting a phonetic book and it encourages them to process/comprehend what they have read (for new readers, the act of decoding can be so challenging that when they get to the end of the sentence, they have a hard time comprehending what they have read).
As an extension, the children can copywrite their favorite sentences and illustrate them.
