Jolly Phonics Actions: What They Are For

Every one of the 42 sounds in Jolly Phonics has its own action and its own song, and the action exists to give your child a second way to remember the sound while the letter shape is still new. It is a memory hook, not a performance. If your child wiggles a hand while saying a sound at the kitchen table, that is the scheme working exactly as intended, and the right response is to join in rather than to stop them.

Here is what the actions are actually for, how long they last, and what to do when they turn into a distraction.

What are Jolly Phonics actions?

Jolly Phonics teaches 42 sounds in seven groups. Each sound is introduced with a movement and a song alongside the letter or letters that spell it. The action is done as the sound is said, so the child is hearing it, saying it, seeing the letters and moving all at once.

The actions themselves are taught in school, and the way they are demonstrated can vary a little from classroom to classroom. If you want to copy them at home, ask for the sheet rather than guessing. Getting an action slightly wrong is harmless, but matching what the teacher does saves your child a small amount of confusion.

Why teach a movement at all?

Because the hardest part of early phonics is not the sounds. Children already know the sounds; they have been speaking English for four years. The hard part is the arbitrary link between a squiggle on a page and a noise.

An action gives that link a second route. A child who has forgotten what the letter says can sometimes recover it from the movement, and once the movement has done its job the letter is usually there on its own. The action is a bridge, and bridges are meant to be crossed rather than lived on.

There is a practical benefit too. A class doing an action is a class you can see thinking. A teacher can scan a room and know instantly which children have the sound and which have not.

Do I need to learn the actions myself?

No. It helps, and children enjoy it, but nothing breaks if you do not. The home job is different from the school job.

What matters far more at home is saying the sounds cleanly. Say the sound with no uh on the end: mmm, not muh. Some sounds are bouncy and should be short and crisp, including b, d, g, k, p and t. Others are stretchy and can be held, including m, s, f, l, n, r, v and z. A child trying to blend muh and ah and tuh will not get to mat, and no amount of actions will fix it.

What do the actions have to do with the songs?

They are a pair. Each sound has both, and the song usually carries the action inside it, so the two get learned together rather than separately.

Songs do a job that actions cannot: they put the sound into a rhythm, and rhythm is one of the oldest memory aids there is. If your child comes home humming something incomprehensible with a hand gesture attached, that is a sound being rehearsed.

You do not have to sing. You do have to resist correcting the tune.

How do the actions fit the seven groups?

Actions arrive with the sounds, group by group. The groups run in this order.

Group 1 is chosen so that real words can be built almost immediately: sat, pin, tap, nip. That is why the actions start paying off within days rather than weeks. By Group 4 the actions are attached to digraphs, two letters making one sound, and that is often where a child leans on them hardest.

Our guide to the seven Jolly Phonics groups goes through each one in more detail, including what becomes readable at each stage.

When do children stop doing the actions?

Gradually, and mostly on their own. A sound that is genuinely known does not need its hook, and children quietly drop the movement for sounds they are confident with while keeping it for the ones they are not.

That makes the actions a useful signal for you. If your child is still reaching for the action on one particular sound weeks after the rest have gone, that is the sound to spend a minute on.

Do not ask them to stop. A child told to stop doing an action will often stop using the sound too.

The reverse case is worth covering as well. Some children refuse to do the actions from the start, particularly older ones or those who have moved schools and arrived mid-scheme and find the whole thing embarrassing. Let it go. The action is a means, not an end, and a child who knows the sound without it has simply skipped a step they did not need.

Forcing it turns a three second memory aid into an argument, and arguments about reading are expensive. If reading at home has already become a nightly fight, our piece on making reading practice less of a battle is the more useful place to start.

The action is scaffolding. You do not admire scaffolding, and you do not take it down before the wall is standing.

My child does the action but still cannot blend. What now?

This is the most common version of the problem, and it is worth naming clearly: knowing individual sounds and blending them into a word are two different skills. The actions help with the first. They do nothing for the second.

Blending is practised by doing it. Say the sounds and let your child say the word: s-t-o-p, stop. Then reverse it. Keep the words short and the sessions shorter.

When they stall on a word in a book, wait five seconds before helping. It feels like a long time and it is not; most children get there at about four. If they are still stuck, give the sounds rather than the word. Saying s-t-o-p hands them the win. Saying "it's stop" hands them nothing.

Do the actions help with spelling as well as reading?

They help with recall, which feeds both. A child trying to write ship who cannot remember how the sh sound is written can sometimes get to it through the action.

What the actions do not do is teach which spelling to choose when there is more than one. That comes later, after the 42 sounds, when Jolly Phonics moves on to alternative spellings. At that point a sound your child knows well turns out to have more than one written form, and the action stays attached to the sound rather than to any one spelling of it.

How should I spend five minutes at home?

Not on actions. Spend it on words. Five minutes is genuinely enough at this age, and the shape that works is roughly the same every night.

Start with two or three sounds your child is shaky on, said cleanly, action included if they want it. Then move straight to blending: you say the sounds, they say the word. Then open the book and read a few pages. Then stop, ideally a page or two before they want to.

Keep the book itself easy. The book that comes home is meant to be comfortable, because it is practice rather than a test, and a child reading fluently is learning more than a child grinding through something a level too hard. Fluency is built by reading easy text quickly, not hard text slowly.

And keep reading aloud to them from books far beyond anything they could decode. That track builds vocabulary, comprehension and appetite, and it is the half of reading that actions have nothing to do with.

Do actions help with the Year 1 phonics screening check?

Indirectly. The check is taken in June of Year 1. A child reads 40 words aloud to a teacher, one to one, and 20 of those words are made-up ones printed beside a small alien. Made-up words cannot be recognised from memory or guessed from the context, so the check tests decoding and nothing else.

Anything that helps a child recall a sound quickly therefore helps a little. But the thing being measured is blending speed, so blending practice is what moves the needle. A threshold mark is published each June, and headteachers must report your child's score to you by the end of the summer term.

Where Lindo Phonics fits

Actions get a sound into a child's head. A book is where it gets used. Lindo makes personalised decodable storybooks that follow a scheme's published progression, so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught, with their own name as the main character.

Pick Jolly Phonics and the group your child has reached, and the story will stay inside those sounds. If you want the background on why that matters, what decodable books actually are is the place to start. The publisher's own material is at Jolly Learning.

Lindo Phonics is not connected to Jolly Phonics and is not endorsed by them. We match the published progression so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught.