Teaching Materials

Jumpstart provides freely available teaching materials and professional development to Principals, teachers and classroom assistants.

The Jumpstart structure is based on the findings of the National Panel of Reading in the USA where they concluded in the year 2000, after studying more than 100,000 literacy programmes that these 5 elements were the key ingredients to any successful literacy programme:

Phonological awareness, phonetics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Jumpstart has its own unique visual alphabet hooks where each image matches the letter’s shape. The pupils are asked to draw their own version of the hook image to embed this connection.

This programme combines the two well known approaches of phonetic decoding and the whole word technique of teaching children to read.

The vowels are shown in red and the consonants in blue, to help pupils see the role of vowels in each syllable. The letters are taught in the same order as Jolly Phonics, with the exception of the vowels first. This gives pupils faster access to a wider number of initial words.

There are two pupil workbooks per year, each one with 12 Steps (chapters). For each Step, a corresponding short comprehension story is taught on a weekly basis.

Kindergarten

The goal is for pupils to be able to confidently decode and blend a phonetically decodable word and to be able to read these words in a short sentence.

Books 1 & 2 are designed for use in Kindergarten and include 2 new letters and 5 focus words a week. These words are chosen to be phonetically decodable.

Each Step moves through a progression of pre-handwriting motor skills to ensure that all pupils have the foundation to write letters.

Each Step comes with a Certificate to celebrate, monitor and track the pupil’s progress.

Grade 1 & Older pupils requiring literacy support

The goal is for pupils to be able to automatically read the 150 focus words taught with increasing fluency and confidence, both in isolation and in a short text.

Books 3 & 4 are suitable for Grade 1 and also for older pupils who are still learning to read and write. These include 2 review letters or new phonic patterns, 10 focus words a week and 3 cheeky words which do not follow phonic patterns so well. These words are chosen to be phonetically decodable and many are from the top 300 high frequency words used in English.

A gently cursive handwriting style is used to enable children to link letters together and remember words as whole units.

Each Step comes with a Certificate to celebrate, monitor and track the pupil’s progress.

In all grades, the programme also continually teaches and reinforces the following skills:

Multisensory activities
Blending
Early motor skills
Handwriting
Phonological awareness
Tracking and scanning
Fluency
Spelling
Comprehension: Retrieval, prediction, visualisation, summarisation & inference

The programme includes an assessment system which provides teachers with invaluable knowledge as to where their pupils are and allows them to plan their lessons accordingly.