The History of Jelly and Bean

The first Jelly and Bean books were written in the summer of 1998 just after the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy.

The Reception Series, the b Series and the Long Vowel Series were first published as full colour A5 books in March 2000. New stories and worksheets have been added since then, so that there are now 110 books, 12 volumes of worksheets and CD-Roms.

The stories were written in response to a family need for phonic material. There were no simple phonic books available on the market for parents at that time.

As an early retired mathematics teacher, Marlene Greenwood set about the task of presenting material in a simple, logical manner.

The first step was to introduce a few written letters (graphemes) and to teach children their sounds (phonemes), and at the same time to blend these letters into a few simple words, i.e. ‘cat hat mat on a’.

Then a few more letters were added, and a few more words, i.e. ‘big box in’. followed by a few more letters and a few more words, i.e. ‘dog log frog and’.

Next the word ‘the’ was introduced together with a few more letters, i.e. ‘p u e y’; followed by the phrase ‘I am’ , and then ‘I can see’ , followed by ‘look at me’.

It took 10 stories of the Reception Series to introduce all the letters of the alphabet.

There was also a strategy to use no capital letters until the small letters were learnt. This also meant that there were no sentences initially.

After the pictures were added, it soon became apparent that it was too easy to ‘read’ the first few books by looking at the pictures and guessing the words. Children did not need to decipher the written code at the bottom of the page.

At this point the b Series was developed. This series introduced the letters of the alphabet in the same order as in the Reception Series and at the same time introduced a few more words e.g. ‘can man hot cot’ were used in the first book as well as ‘cat hat mat on’.

Children had to know the sounds of these letters and how to blend them together in order to read this book.

This strategy was continued for the whole of the b Series to ensure that all the letters sounds, and how to blend them into words, was completed for every letter of the alphabet.

The next task in the logical progression was then to introduce the vowel digraphs and their appropriate spellings.

This was done in the Long Vowel Series with the introduction of each spelling of each long vowel sound.

The stories in this series were initially written for the teacher to present to the class in a ‘big book’, so that the grapheme/phoneme correspondences were taught to everyone. However, it was very expensive to produce these ‘big books’, and A5 books were published instead.

Then all the spellings of the other vowel digraphs were introduced in the More Vowels Series, again as teaching texts in ‘big book’ form. Yet these were too expensive to produce and so A5 books were published instead.

With all the books being published in A5 size it soon became obvious that some stories were needed for children to practise blending consonants at the beginning and end of words. Hence all the books dealing with this aspect of the English language were published in A5 size also, i.e. the Pig Family Series the Pig Family Blends Series. Consonants, Blends & Clusters Series.

Later the Gold Series was added to deal with ‘soft c’ and ‘soft g’.

Teachers also wanted some activities to accompany the books, and so all the worksheets were written and illustrated.

The advent of interactive whiteboards now means that the stories can be used as they were originally intended. Teachers can buy CD-Roms at reasonable prices and teach a whole class at once.