Fifteen consonants represent the same sound almost everywhere they appear. They are the reliable floor the rest of the system is built on.
Letter sounds
b d f h j k l m n p r t v w z CONSONANT_STABLE_01
Strong rule · High reliability · Very common · Beginner · Reading and spelling
Where Wiggler teaches it: Skill 1: First Sounds & Blending · Skill 2: CVC Word Mastery
These letters are the easy ones. They say the same thing nearly every time you see them.
These fifteen letters represent one sound each in nearly every word a beginning reader will meet. A decoder should try that sound first and expect it to work.
Each of these graphemes has a single dominant phoneme correspondence with very high positional consistency. Their exceptions are almost entirely confined to digraphs where the letter is part of a larger unit (th, sh, ch, wh, ph, ng) or to silent-letter families (kn, wr, mb, lamb), both of which are taught as separate graphemes rather than as exceptions to the letter.
bat, dog, fun, net, zip
hop, jam, kit, leg, map, pin, run, tap, van, wet, rib, sad, him, cup, buzz
Made-up words that follow the rule. A child who reads these has the pattern rather than the vocabulary.
fim, vap, jub, rez, wug
Teach these early and lean on them. They are what makes CVC decoding feel like it works, and a child needs a period where decoding reliably pays off before meeting the parts of English that do not. Note that c, g, s, x and y are deliberately not on this list — each has a real second sound and each has its own entry.
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