Bought the Letterland Living ABC cd-rom sometime ago as I wanted to move beyond the 26 basic letter sounds + the 5 vowel sounds (i.e the vowels saying their letter names). There are more than 40 phonemes and mummy here is very lost.
Other than the cd-rom, we already had The ABC Book, Alphabet of Rhymes, and My ABC of Letters.
BUT I have not been using the cd-rom regularly with Jiale. The main reason is I saw him starting to get 'addicted' to it - everytime he saw me using the laptop, he asked for 'abc' : ( No tantrums when I refused, but I foresaw it happening. So I decided to put it aside for the time being and only let him watch occasionally. Now we are just reading the Letterland books and listening to the audio CDs.
I also read the Letterland Teacher's Guide but did not find it very useful. Instead, I have bought two more Letterland storybooks - Beyond ABC and Far Beyond ABC. These are for sounds like 'sh', 'ch' etc, and too chim for Jiale now. They are mainly for me to learn and remember what the digraphs and trigraphs sound like, as the books are stories of why 's' and 'h' don't make their usual sounds when they are together. Jiale also likes to flip through the storybooks : )
On a sidenote, I read that there are concerns about children being dependent on the Letterland characters to recognize the letters, e.g. they only know 'c' when they see the cat, but not when it's the plain letter. Jiale has no such issue, probably because he learnt his alphabet just using the plain letters, before I started him on Letterland (to learn & reinforce phonics).
On top of that, I have also been exploring the other phonics learning systems such as Jolly Phonics. I like the Jolly Songs as they sound just like normal children's songs, i.e. a nursery rhymes with adapted lyrics, so we can listen to the CD while we are playing with other things. Letterland songs, on the other hand, sound more boring :p I will continue to look out for and explore other ways for me to learn phonics and to teach Jiale, after all, what I do not know, I cannot teach.
(By the way, the conclusion is, I am STILL lost about phonics. I hope very much Jiale is not an auditory learner, cos my spoken English cannot make it. Hope hope hope he's visual or whatever!!)
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