The Phonibet
FUNetix® the App, which is the digital encapsulation of FUNetix® the curriculum, works by first teaching children "phonemic awareness" using the Phonibet®.
Very simply, the Phonibet is the Alphabet of Sounds of the English language. The Phonibet is a visual embodiment of each sound of American English.
So, for example, the Acorn represents the /ay/ sound. The Eagle represents the /ee/ sound. The Eye represents the /eye/ sound, etc.
English has 44 sounds. Each sound is called a phoneme. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound of a spoken language, an utterance. Phonemes can be classified, very generally, as consonants and vowels.
The Phonibet represents ALL of the consonant and ALL of the vowel sounds of the spoken American English language.
Modern scientific research has demonstrated that knowing the sounds of the spoken language is the first and MOST IMPORTANT step that children must take before they can learn how to read a phonetically derived code like English.
And one of the easiest ways to teach a list of sounds is to create a visual feedback loop for each sound, a character representation, as it were. We call our list of named sound symbols "The Alphabet."
But the problem that we quickly run into is that the English spoken language has 44 sounds but we've created named symbols for only 26 of them (and some of them are redundant, like "c" and "k.") The Alphabet only has 26 letters. So when we refer to sounds that don't have a specific letter associated with them, we don't have a name to call them...and a sound without a name is a very difficult thing to talk about for both teachers AND young students.
So the Phonibet, simply put, gives EVERY sound in the English language a name. It's really quite simple: but it's a game changer.
How the Phonibet Becomes a Simple Children's Writing System>