About Fun Fonix

: My name is Mark Cox and I have been teaching English in Japan since 1999. I teach kindergarten, elementary, junior high school and older students once a week and it took forever to get through some of the traditional phonics books. I needed something that moved quickly but still adequately covered the material. I have been creating my own teaching materials since 2002. I've made various ESL classroom materials, printable games and onlines games for students. I made my first Fun Fonix workbook in 2006 and it all started from there.

The story behind the Fun Fonix Series: I teach ESL in Japan and I began making these workbooks for my own students. I use these with young learners that have been studying with me for a while, but most of the students using these materials are older elementary school students and even junior high school students. Since my students are a little older, they are able to learn and absorb more at a time, and they don't need as much practice with writing the alphabet. In my lessons, phonics is just a small part of a once-a-week, one-hour lesson. So, I can't spend a lot of time on phonics instruction. Another issue for my students was vocabulary. Words like 'sap' or using the same image for 'sit' and 'sat', 'run' and 'ran', make some other materials difficult to use. So, the Fun Fonix books were designed to solve these issues.

I started with the Intro Book and I had a couple versions. The original version had more advanced drawings but the students didn't really take to those. They seemed to like the quick doodles that I drew on the board more. So, I swapped out the images and the books were instantly more successful. I continued on with Book 1 and Book 2. However, my students just keep getting older, faster than we can get through these books. So, I stopped making new books for a while. After a few requests from teachers and my own desire to complete the series, I made 3 more books, Fun Fonix ABC and Book 3 and Book 4. I do have plans for more, so I hestitate to say that I'm done.

The artwork are black and white images to save on ink and also to allow the books to be colored by the students. I generally assign coloring as homework, hoping they will color the images but also review what they learned in class. The images are a little light and I do that purposefully to make them look like the original pencil drawings. I have darkened them slightly over the years, because of feedback from other teachers. If you have any problems or questions about the images, please let me know.

The 2018 Update: I updated the site to make it mobile responsive and hopefully more useful. I updated the worksheet makers with a new print menu and hopefully fixed some small issues with alignment of text in different browsers. I also added 2 new worksheet templates: spaghetti string matching worksheets and a free writing template.

The future of Fun Fonix: I hope to add at least 2 more books - Book 5 ('r' controlled vowels) and Book 6 (the final phonics book you'll ever need.) I also hope to add more images for other categories and phonics rules. However, if you have suggestions or needs, please send me a message. Since I don't have much personal need for more materials at this point, other projects usually end up taking presidence, but I become a lot more motivated when I learn that there are people out there who like and want to use the Fun Fonix materials. So, please let me know what you'd like to see!

Contact Fun Fonix: I'm always happy to get feedback, suggestions or just here stories about how people re using the materials. Please send me any questions or ideas you have for additional resources. I'm looking forward to hearing from you! There is a contact link at the bottom of every page or here are some other options:
email: mark@mes-english.com
FaceBook: MES
Google Plus: Mark Cox

For more of my MES phonics resources:

- MES Phonics: phonics flashcards, handouts, posters, alphabet activities and more

- Tools for Educators - Phonics: more phonics worksheet and phonics game makers