About Us

About Jolly Discoveries

Jolly Discoveries offers teachers throughout Australia professional development in synthetic phonics, grammar and other related areas of literacy as well as assisting students with learning needs. Literacy in particular is a passion of the Jolly Discoveries team.

Our main aim is to spread the word on the benefits of synthetic phonics as well as traditional and functional grammar. Our school professional development sessions that we offer are listed below.

More About Us

Recently Jolly Discoveries branched out into the very popular area of technology in education; in particular educational apps. In September 2013, ‘Phonics under the Big Top’ was released for both ipad and android tablets. ‘Phonics under the Big Top’ is a colourful, interactive, fun educational synthetic phonics app which has been written by Celeste.

It reinforces a basic phonetic code of the English language by looking at 42 phonemes (letter sounds). Phoneme pronunciation, letter formation, initial sounds, end sounds, common digraphs and basic spelling using phoneme joining are all covered in ‘Phonics under the Big Top’.

In 2015, a second app was released called ‘Phonics under the Big Top Advanced’, which reinforces and builds a student’s awareness of phonics to a more advanced level.

Both apps are the beginning of an exciting new adventure for Jolly Discoveries in its quest to bring education and technology together.

Our Team

In 2005 Jolly Discoveries was formed by Celeste and a teaching colleague who both had a passion for providing children in their early years with a wide range of learning strategies that would endeavor to tap into their specific learning needs. Celeste Musgrave has been a primary school teacher in NSW, Australia with over 25 years of classroom experience. She has specialised in the areas of early literacy and numeracy development in young children as well as the education of students with special needs. Celeste completed a Masters degree with a thesis investigating children’s ability to learn higher order mathematical concepts. Celeste has also in-serviced teachers in mathematical discovery in the early years in various parts of Asia. The area of literacy development, in particular the reading and writing process using a synthetic phonics approach began her journey in teacher professional development. Celeste used a synthetic phonics program called Jolly Phonics by Sue Lloyd and Sara Wernham in her classroom for 10 years and witnessed children succeeding in reading and writing.