Phase 3 phonics sounds: “er” sound jolly phonics

How to teach er sound:

We are going to teach kids the er sound through 6 steps. Each step will add a lot of fun and liveliness to the learning time. Let’s see together:

1. sound er story:

Merna and Dexter were helping their mother in the kitchen. She was cooking a big sweet chocolate cake. She opened the mixer and started to mix some ingredients and while she was starting to run the mixer it made “errrrr…..errrrr”. The sound was very loud but the children thought it is so funny and kept laughing at her.

2. er sound jolly phonics pronunciation:

• To make the “er” sound correctly, focus on pronouncing two sounds and making a smooth connection between them.
• Start with making the “e” sound. Slightly open your mouth, spread your lips and relax them. 
• By the way, there are some variations in how the vowel in the “er” sound could be pronounced. It’s okay to tense your lips and make a sound that falls somewhere in between the tense /i/ and the relaxed /e/ vowels. 
• For the rest of this video, we’ll stick with the relaxed /ɪ/ for the sake of simplicity. 
• Now, let’s place your tongue in the correct position for the “e”.
• Raise your tongue high in your mouth and push it to the front. The tip of your tongue can be lowered just behind your bottom front teeth.
• Next, connect the “e” to the “r” sound with a long gliding movement. 
• Slightly round your lips. Curl back the tip of your tongue. 
• Now, slightly lower the center of your tongue and raise its back. Your tongue should be tensed. 

Click here to know HOW TO TEACH JOLLY PHONICS STEP-BY-STEP

3. jolly phonics digraph er dictation:

walk with your kid step by step on his notebook to write the following digraph. Show him the gif below and motivate him to imitate it.

4. er sound digraph tracing worksheet:

Here’s the digraph “er” tracing worksheet to practice:

5. jolly phonics sound er – blending exercise:

Use our phonics phase 2 and phase 3 flashcards to practice some pronunciation activities with your kid: 

• First level: Make combinations of the flashcards below and let the child recognize which letters are making the sound “er”.
• Advanced level: Let the child assemble the words below by himself. keep telling him the pronunciation of the word until he can make the combination alone. 

• The word the kid should make here is “kinder”.

Try other words too…

jolly phonics sound er – words dictation:

Write on the board or on a piece of paper the following table of graphemes. Give the kid some oral words that can only be combined with available graphemes in the table. See how your kid will be able to form a word from.

The teacher/parent here may say :

“better”

Now the kid has to know how to form the latter word from the table using his listening skills and his knowledge of blending.

after the teacher/parent pronounce the word the kid should arrange the word following the pronunciation he heard

if you want more content for your kid you can check our free educational games