Building Blends, Phonograms, and Digraphs with the Montessori Green Series

If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ll remember reading about our reading journey beginning with the Montessori Pink Series and followed by the Montessori Blue Series! There is one more series to learn once those are mastered, and it is known as the Montessori Green Series.

While the Pink Series focuses on 3 letter consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words with a short vowel, the Blue Series begins to introduce consonant blends while retaining that short vowel/phonetic element. English is a complicated language, and the Green Series introduces all of the other blends, phonograms, and digraphs.

As with each of the other series, I began by introducing one new sound combination at a time [in the above case, it was /ea/]. While L raced her way through our Pink Series and Blue Series cards, she slowed down a bit with the Green Series as it is so much more complicated.

Because there are so many different blends, phonograms, and digraphs to learn with the Green Series, we are only about halfway through at this point. Once L has practiced building each of the words in our folders, I’ll give her the word cards along with the photo cards and ask her to match them. After that, I will print out our Green Series word lists for extra practice.

With each of our reading series cards, I commissioned special felt pockets from Courtesy and Grace specifically to fit my cards. I separated our Pink and Blue Series into four different sets each and our Green Series into seven different sets, then placed each pocket set into a slot on the holders my husband made for us.