5 Skills of Jolly Phonics: What Each Skill Is and How to Teach It

The 5 Skills at a Glance

Skill 1: Learning the Letter Sounds

Children learn the 42 sounds of Jolly Phonics in 7 groups, usually one new sound a day. Each sound comes with a story, an action and a song.

Good progress: your child sees a letter or digraph and says its sound instantly, without doing the action first.

Skill 2: Learning Letter Formation

Children learn to form each letter correctly: first in the air, then by tracing, then with a pencil. Jolly Phonics pays attention to where each letter starts and which way it goes, because good formation now makes joined handwriting easier later.

Good progress: letters start in the right place and sit correctly on the line; the pencil grip is relaxed.

More detail: Jolly Phonics letter formation and pencil grip.

Skill 3: Blending (for Reading)

Blending means saying the sounds in a written word and joining them to hear the word: /s/ /u/ /n/ → sun. This is the skill that turns sound knowledge into reading.

Blending practice starts in the first week, with only a few sounds known. Children start with three-sound words (sat, pin), then move to words with digraphs (ship, rain) and consonant blends (flag, stop).

Good progress: the child sounds out an unfamiliar simple word and says the word, without being told.

Step-by-step guide: how to teach blending in phonics.

Skill 4: Identifying Sounds in Words (for Spelling)

Also called segmenting, this is blending in reverse. The child hears a word and breaks it into its sounds: dog → /d/ /o/ /g/. Then they write a letter or digraph for each sound. This is how children spell unfamiliar words independently.

See our full guide to segmenting in phonics.

Good progress: the child can spell simple regular words from dictation, for example hen, shop, rain.

Skill 5: Tricky Words

Some very common words have parts that don't follow the sounds children have learned, like the, was, said and one. Jolly Phonics teaches 72 of these tricky words in a set order.

The method is not pure memorising. Children sound out the regular parts and pay attention to the tricky part. In said, only ai is unusual; /s/ and /d/ are regular.

Good progress: the child reads the first tricky words (I, the, he, she, me, we, be, was, to, do, of) instantly in sentences.

How the 5 Skills Work Together in a Lesson

In a typical Jolly Phonics lesson, all five skills appear in about 20–30 minutes:

This mix is why children taught with Jolly Phonics can often read and write simple words within the first few months.

Which Skill Matters Most?

All five matter, but blending and identifying sounds are where children most often get stuck. Many children in India and the Gulf know every sound because they have learned the songs, yet cannot read. Usually they have learned Skill 1 without enough practice in Skills 3 and 4.

If your child can sing the Jolly Phonics songs but cannot read cat or spell sun, focus practice on blending and dictation rather than learning more sounds.

Teaching the 5 Skills at Home or in Class

Parents: 10–15 minutes a day is enough: two minutes of sound revision, a few words to blend, and a few words to spell.

Teachers: the five skills and how to deliver each one live, including correct pronunciation and online teaching, are covered in our Jolly Phonics teacher training course.

Children: our small-group online phonics classes practise all five skills in every session, with individual correction. Older children who missed these foundations can catch up in our advanced phonics classes for ages 7–12.