Phonics

What are phonics?

Phonics: a method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with symbols in an alphabetic writing system.

Vocabulary

Phoneme: the sound the letters make.

Grapheme: the letters or letters used to write the phoneme.

Digraph: a 2 letter grapheme. For example, ch, sh, th, ng, ai.

Trigraph: a 3 letter grapheme. For example, igh, ear, air

Split vowel digraph: A two letter grapheme that represent a vowel phoneme or sound where the sounds are pushed apart by another letter. This digraph often used to be referred to as a magic e. For example, kite, cake, phone, these, cube.

Blending: Building words for reading by pushing together all the phonemes or sounds in the word.

Segmenting: Splitting up words for spelling by breaking up words into all their sounds and then working out what letter or letters are needed to represent each sound.