With the BEGINNER Letter F videos we are introducing upper and lower case Ff, as well as three sounds, the long F consonant sound you hear when the letter F is talked about (we mark this with an upper case F since that is the sound the letter F makes when by itself, and it will often be seen in upper case form at the start of a sentence), and the short f consonant sound (we mark with a lower case f) you hear in our keyword five. We chose the word five, by the way, as a word students will know, and as part of our number set. It's not entirely ideal as it has a silent e at the end, and a word like fan would have been easier. This is the first time on the BEGINNER Truphonics course that we have introduced a silent letter. But fear not! It's a good thing to start introducing these ideas, and young students are highly flexible and can handle the rather poorly designed English phonetic system! We won't be teaching how magic e lengthens vowel sounds yet - we will save that for later! We are also introducing two digraph phonemes and graphemes - fl and fr in fly and frog.

There is a video about frogs and flies, including the Crazy Frog song, which students love (I like to narrate what is happening as the song plays for them). There is the popular Finger Family song, and a Freeze dance, where students need to dance until they freeze! There is also a bee, ladybug and butterfly song, drawing on their knowledge of insects (and we learned bee previously). We introduce students to the famous children's rhyme and song There was an old lady who swallowed a fly, which is somewhat horrific in its content, but the cartoon makes it unoffensive, and students seem to love the weirdness of it! It has a certain trophic pyramid logic to it (though I don't think cows eat dogs!) - I am reminded of the character Renfield's strange tastes in Dracula (also an inovel course on this website). Since the song was released in 1946, it may well have been influenced by the vampire novel. There is also a video to teach the writing of the f letter!