Is your child currently learning to read using Phonics? Supporting their reading at home is so important. But if your struggling to remember your digraph from your trigraph, you can’t quite get your head round segmenting and blending and you are doubting yourself with pronouncing all the phonemes..don’t panic, we may have discovered a genius solution.. Carter’s Yard Phonics Flash Cards.

What are they?

A pack of 32, double sided flash cards with 64 phonic sounds for kids created by two experienced primary school teachers. The cards are split into 3 difficulty levels which are colour coded in increasing difficulty from red to orange to green.

Each card cleverly includes a ‘Zap Code’. Once you’ve downloaded the free Zappar App onto your smart phone, your child can scan the Zap Code with your phone. Through augmented reality they can get the app to read the word on the card to them e.g ‘Sock’ . The app will also correctly pronounce the featured phonic sound (phonemes) e.g “S’ and even blend the phonemes together e.g. ‘S-o-ck’.

What did we like about them?

• Engaging– Kids love them! We found that the children really enjoyed ‘playing’ (shh..don’t tell them they were learning!) with the Carter’s Yard Phonic Flash Cards and app. They were incredibly motivated to scan the codes with the smart phone and play the phonemes and words. As with a lot of new skill acquisition, the key to success, in my experience is engagement. Make something so exciting that the kids want to learn it and you are half way there.

• Supports Parents – As I already eluded to, this resource is not just useful for children but it is a valuable support for you, their parents too. No matter how dedicated and supportive you are, phonics is probably not how you learnt to read yourself. Therefore, supporting your child’s learning of phonics can be a huge learning curve. A google search might help you get your head round the definitions of the key words like ‘digraph’ , ‘trigraph’, ‘phoneme’ etc but pronouncing the phonemes correctly (on demand, at any given moment from your 5 year old child!) can be a stumbling block for most! That’s where this resource comes in, you can relax in knowing that the app will help correctly pronounce the phoneme on the card to your child. Ensuring that they will be taught how to read in the same way at home as they are doing in school.

• Enables Independent Learning– I particularly loved that the Carter’s Yard Phonics Flash Cards enables children to learn and practise phonics themselves (under supervision with a phone). I’ve watched as children have happily sat sounding out words and scanning them to check they’ve got it right with these cards. Not only do many young children thrive when given a tiny bit of independence in their learning, but by doing it themselves they set the pace and are therefore able to process their own learning.

• Practical– This phonics resource is very practical. I believe it’s good value for money (the cards cost £9.99 and the App is free to download) . It’s also small, portable, high quality and very easy to use.

Visit the Carter’s Yard Website Here

Buy them on Amazon here

* Please note this post is sponsored and we received a pack of flash cards for review. All thoughts and opinions are our own.