About the Author

The author, Marlene Greenwood, (nee Whalley) attended Leeds University from 1981-1984, where she gained an honours degree in Mathematics and the History and Philosophy of Science. She then went on to gain a PGCE in 1985 and taught Mathematics to pupils aged 11-18 up to A level Pure and Applied in secondary schools in Ilkley and Harrogate. 

After leaving teaching in 1996, Marlene began writing and illustrating phonic reading material for her family. Her first attempts were 48 stories about two bears called Tig and Ted.

When the National Literacy Strategy was published in 1998, Marlene realised that her stories fitted the phonic progression of this document. She had coincidentally anticipated the guidelines to teachers. She had a store of phonic material now likely to be in demand.

However, the Tig and Ted characters were proving to be very difficult to illustrate, and it was when two pet kittens came into the family in June 1998, that the inspiration needed to write and illustrate the Jelly and Bean books was complete.

The first sets of books were developed over the next few years with the help of staff and pupils at Harrogate based Saltergate Infant School and Beckwithshaw Primary School. The first Jelly and Bean books were published from home in March 2000 and since then they have enjoyed tremendous success.

The books were commercially printed for the first time in 2005, and Jelly and Bean Ltd was set up in January 2006.

In January 2007 the company moved to Follifoot Ridge Business Park, and it was a luxury to have a warehouse and an office in the same building.

The books were the first phonically decodable material available to schools in England and fitted the bill for the Rose Review in 2006.

However, they were not compatible with the phonic progression of the government's new phonic programme Letters and Sounds launched in September 2007.

Some of the vowel spellings Marlene had introduced in the More Vowels Series, aimed at children in Year 2, now had to be taught in the Reception Year.

Marlene's first attempt to reconcile these differences was to rewrite the More Vowels Series, making each story shorter and simpler, so that it was accessible to younger children. These stories were put together to become the English Vowels Series and they were published at the end of 2008.

However, this was not enough to solve the problem of providing easy reading books for children in the Reception Year and Year 1. There was still a need for short stories using words which contained the vowel digraphs of Phonic Phase 3 of Letters and Sounds.

Follifoot Farm Series 1 was written with this in mind and published early in 2010.

Follifoot Farm Series 2 was published later the same year. This series has 6 books, each forming part of the same story. The cliffhanger ending on the last page of each book encourages children to read the next one. The two new cat characters, Rumple and Pippin, are the latest additions to her real life family.

In February 2011 Marlene decided not to reprint all the fourteen books of the Consonants, Blends and Clusters Series because reading these books delayed the introduction of the vowel digraphs of the English language. She chose just five of them to revise and reprint and named them the Combining Consonants Series.

She has continued to concentrate her efforts on writing stories that focus on easy vowel digraphs. The Early Vowel Combinations Series was published in February 2011.The word content and the number of sentences per page were kept as low as possible so that children were not overwhelmed by the amount of text on a page.

Follifoot Farm Series 3 will be printed in the autumn. This will give children six books, again each one part of the same story, to practise reading words with the 'magic 'e'' or split digraph spellings.

August 2011