Linguists? Help ... Learning to read, and voiced/unvoiced issues ...

[NotQuiteCockney]

DS1 (5) is finally reading, and he's doing pretty well. But he's struggling with d/p/b, partly because of the whole p/b issue. Is this normal?

He'll start sounding out, and say "o" "b" "op". Is it harder to say unvoiced consonants after vowels? It seems like it might be ...

He absolutely can hear and make b/p just fine. Any suggestions?

Oh, should have said, school is doing jolly phonics.

Haven't got a clue what jolly phonics is but I'll try to help anyway.
p and b have the same place of articulation (they're labials), the only difference is that b is voiced (the vocal cords are moving) and p is unvoiced (they're not moving). So I can see any reason why he should struggle more with one than the other, as long as he can articulate one of them, and he seems to. Is it only in word finals that he has difficulty ? Could he be dyslexic ? does he do the same with d and t ?

Jolly Phonics is a constructive phonics system, I think. One of the big brands.

He has a bit of problem with d and t, but less, I think because the written letters don't resemble each other?

I looked at the symptoms for dyslexia today, and he doesn't really fit them. I'm pretty sure this is normal stuff ...

Ok, payed specific attention to this when he was reading today, and it is definately about the ends of words, very rarely the beginnings.

I got him to go "op" "ob" "op" "ob" for a while, and that seemed to improve things.