Candy 4Way Phonics is a free phonics program downloaded as PDF files. The main program consists of 50 files that are numbered and used pretty much in order, so it’s not overwhelming. The first file, How to Follow the Program, is an 11-page explanation of the course components, when to use them, and what each component accomplishes. The second file is an 83-page instruction manual titled, How to Teach Candy’s Systematic 4WAY Phonics – Step by Step. The first chapter explains the rationale for teaching intensive phonics. The rest of the book explains how to teach the program. (Parents already convinced of the value of intensive phonics can skip the first chapter of How to Teach.) The course name is based on its use of four teaching strategies that are explained in Chapter Six of How to Teach. While parents might not need to read everything in both files, I found that I needed both to understand how the program works. (Note that How to Teach sometimes refers to course resources that you can purchase, but they are all provided for free now.)
Parents teach the consonant and short vowel sounds using the seven Alphabet and Vowel Charts and flashcards before beginning the first of 100 lessons.
The 100 lessons are presented 10 at a time in five different files titled:
- Candy Cane Daily Phonics Lessons
- Sprinkle Daily Phonics Lessons
- Cupcake Daily Phonics Lessons
- Jelly Belly Daily Phonics Lessons
- Frosting Daily Phonics Lessons
The lessons show only what is to be learned since instructional information is in the first two files. If you’ve read those files, you should be able to work through the lessons without having to refer back to them. You can download a free audio package featuring the author reading aloud every lesson. There’s also a free download with 65 wall cards that illustrate the phonograms. Yet another free download has eight wall cards that serve as visual aids for letters that children tend to write in reverse. These other files are not essential but might be helpful.
The first 20 lessons, called Candy Cane Daily Phonics Lessons, begin by teaching students to blend one consonant followed by a short vowel. Children learn to read consonant-vowel phonograms for all of the consonants, except the course reverses the order with the letter x, so they read ax, ex, etc. In Lesson 20, students progress to consonant-vowel-consonant words as they learn to blend sounds to make actual words rather than a mixture of words and nonsense syllables.
The next 20 lessons, called Sprinkle Daily Phonics Lessons, teach consonant-vowel-consonant words; words ending in double consonants, such as sell and mess; and consonant digraphs, such as ck, ft, ct, and pt. Cupcake Daily Phonics Lessons add suffixes, more-challenging phonograms like th, ph, kn, and mb. Jelly Belly Daily Phonics Lessons teach longer words; phonograms like tch, oo, ould, and spl; and the soft-g sound, as in twinge and singe. The last lesson in Jelly Belly introduces silent-e words and includes a five-stanza poem that playfully uses the words would, could, and should along with several long vowel words. Jelly Belly incorporates short stories into the lessons for reading practice. Frosting Daily Phonics Lessons teach more long-vowel phonograms; tricky phonograms like au and ough; the schwa sound of a; and suffixes like cial, tial, ious, tion, ture, and sure. Most lessons in Frosting Daily Phonics Lessons include a short story or the beginning of a story. (Yes, some of these are teasers.)
The course generally teaches basic rules within the lessons at the points where children need to apply them. Rules are repeated several times throughout the program, but the rules are learned through drills and practice reading words and sentences rather than memorization activities.
Rhyme and alliteration are used frequently to make the reading fun, as in the first sentence in Lesson 6 of Sprinkle Daily Phonics Lessons:
I fed a dog and I sat in muck.
I set a rock on fat Bob Duck.
From that point on, students gradually read more sentences while continuing to drill on individual words. Readers are introduced after every fifth lesson of Sprinkle Daily Phonics Lessons, with four readers per level through the rest of the program.
The eight- to eighteen-page PDF readers have full-color, clip-art images. While the artwork isn’t professional and consistent in style, it serves the purpose. The readers gradually progress in both difficulty and amount of text per page and use only vocabulary that has been taught in the program to that point. The fourth Sprinkle reader is a 16-page story, although it has only one sentence of text on all but one page. Beginning with the first Cupcake reader, most of them tell a single story, and some are divided into chapters.
Four additional readers—the Ooey Gooeys series—are to be used after children complete the program. How to Follow the Program says, “These last four readers will carry your child into 4th-grade-level reading” (p. 5). The last file in the program, Candy’s Lifetime Rhyming Phonics Charts, consists of nine charts that review all the phonograms with sample words. These can be used for review or assessment.
Children learn to read many styles of writing. The reading material in both the lessons and the readers is often silly, sometimes serious, sometimes teaches moral lessons, and in at least two instances (Jelly Bellies Story 2: “Catching a Glimpse of God” and Ooey Gooey’s Story 4: “The Circuit Riders”) has religious content.
The program limits the number of sight words taught to 58 in the entire program, in comparison to the 315 on the Dolch Sight Word List. A few words are initially presented as sight words, but Frosting Daily Phonics Lessons point out when the phonograms for words such as put and your have been taught and those words are no longer sight words.
Summary
Candy 4Way Phonics provides a very comprehensive phonics program that will take students from learning to read up to the fourth-grade level. Everything you need, plus extras like the audio files, is free.
