Captain Matt's Super Crazy Fun Big Kid Phonics 1: Student Book

Super Crazy Fun Phonics is a series of Phonics textbooks released under the Captain Matt banner. It has the same 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. These 5 levels are available for 4 different age ranges: Preschool, Kindergarten, Elementary (regular Phonics), and “Big Kid” (designed for older students and the majority of ESL students). This is book 1 of the BIG KID series. It was the first book we developed when we decided that our ESL students needed something more age appropriate. Their ages ranged from eight to eleven, and the older kids were rolling their eyes at the content of the mainstream phonics books which are aimed at a much younger audience.
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, vocabulary, chants and stories for each level are consistent between the different age ranges, so moving up to more challenging content, or even down to easier content if required is possible as the book levels are progressed though. We hope your students enjoy these silly books.