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Consider the word ‘to’. It is written as two letters with a white space either side. Once we have seen it and someone has told us how to pronounce it, we are able to remember ‘to’ in its written form. We learn its sound (phonology) and its spelling (orthography). It is a unit of meaning […]

Answer: When it crosses a syllable boundary. A digraph is two letters that combine together to correspond to one sound (phoneme). Examples of consonant digraphs are ‘ch, sh, th, ng’.  Examples of vowel digraphs are ‘ea, oa, oe, ie, ue, ar, er, ir, or, ur ‘. If we think about consonant digraphs first we see […]

The description I am about to write relates to what I think children have to do when they are beginning to learn to read and write using phonics. In particular, it is about what they have to do when learning how to abstract phonemes from words. I was motivated to write some easy books because […]

Syllables Syllables are the smallest units of spoken language that humans articulate in normal speech. They are made up of a vowel called the ‘nucleus’ and an optional consonant before and/or after the vowel. *** The consonant (or cluster of consonants) before the vowel is called the onset. The consonant (or cluster of consonants) after […]

The Jelly and Bean Reading Scheme begins with the books in the AB Starter Pack. The material and ideas in this series are reinforced in two parallel series, the First Words Series and Tom and Bella Series 1. All three series are for the Phonic Phase 2 of Letters and Sounds and the Pink book band. […]

DECODING The term ‘decoding’ is often used to describe the transcription of written text to spoken language. I suggest it is this particular term, ‘decoding’, used in different contexts, that is responsible for much of the muddled thinking related to reading, writing and, in particular, synthetic phonics. In order to try to clarify the concept, […]

In the 17th century, the spellings of English words were ‘set in stone’ when the first dictionaries were written. These spellings have not changed over time. It is because of this, that we can read books written in previous centuries. However, the 26 letters of the English alphabet are pronounced in many different ways in written […]

The Jelly and Bean reading scheme has grown and evolved since it was first envisaged in 1998. The original phonic strategy was neither analytic phonic nor synthetic phonic. It was simply a combination of the author’s own knowledge of phonics adapted to the sequence and progression of the National Literacy Strategy introduced by the UK government […]

Written language turns our continuous stream of speech into distinct static units, separated by spaces, on paper or on a screen. These static units are words. Words are the smallest units of meaning needed for verbal thought. They are combined into larger units of phrases and sentences when we are thinking about the world and […]

Babies do not learn to talk by identifying individual sounds (phonemes) and blending these into words. They learn by first working out the meanings of whole words and phrases spoken to them by their carers. Then they learn how to modify their own first vocal productions to match the sounds in these words that mean something to them.  It is their need to communicate with others that drives the […]