Super Crazy Fun Phonics 1 is the first in a series of Phonics textbooks released under the Captain Matt banner. There are 5 levels generally accepted as the standard in phonics books, those being Single Letter Sounds, Short Vowel Sounds, Long Vowel Sounds, Consonant Blends, and Vowel Combinations. This book is level one, Single Letter Sounds, or "the alphabet." These 5 levels are available for 4 different age ranges: Preschool, Kindergarten, Elementary (that is this book, "Phonics"), and "Big Kid" (designed for older students and the majority of ESL students). This is level 1 of our regular phonics series. It is aimed at late starters and ESL students. These phonics books were created because we felt that the phonics books available to us were not engaging enough, so we added some content that we believed our students would find to be fun. It is no secret that how engaged a student is has a great deal to do with quality of outcome. We chose vocabulary that we felt would engage over vocabulary that might be useful, with the rationale being that we are teaching students how to recognize sounds and how they fit together, not new words and their meanings. Any vocabulary gain is of secondary importance. We also chose to use both small text and images along with large. This is to balance cognitive stress and cognitive ease. Children's eyes are perfectly able to see small text and images, and the process of looking closely encourages greater focus. Not all text and images are small though, just to please (ease) the eye. Most children's books lean more toward the latter. Theme and content of each level is consistent between the different age ranges, so moving up or down to easier or more challenging content is possible as the book levels are progressed though. We hope your students enjoy these silly books.
