You'll see that we use the Blue Cow monster (/ʌ/) in the earliest stages. This is because it is the phoneme (speech sound) the children actually produce when segmenting words, as they over-pronounce the sound. When producing the whole word, they are using the schwa (/ə/), especially in connected speech, but they won't understand that at first. We call it 'the Silly Schwa' because we sound so silly producing the sound—it's the most commonly used vowel sound but is integrated so well into other sounds that it can be difficult to hear and produce. It is the sound used at the end of the names Emma, Maya, Skyla, Lara, Spencer etc