Phonics

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What is Phonics?

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Phonics is a method of teaching reading and writing by developing learners' phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in spoken words.

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What is a Phoneme?

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A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. For example, the word 'cat' has three phonemes: /k/, /æ/, and /t/.

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What is a Grapheme?

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A grapheme is a letter or a group of letters that represent a phoneme. For example, the grapheme 'sh' represents the phoneme /ʃ/ as in 'shoe'.

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What does it mean to Blend sounds?

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Blending sounds means to combine individual sounds to form a word. For example, blending /c/, /a/, and /t/ makes the word 'cat'.

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What does it mean to Segment sounds?

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Segmenting sounds means to break a word into its individual sounds. For example, the word 'dog' can be segmented into /d/, /ɔ/, and /g/.

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What is a Vowel?

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A vowel is a letter that represents a speech sound made with an open vocal tract. The vowels in English are A, E, I, O, U.

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What is a Consonant?

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A consonant is a letter that represents a speech sound made by partially or completely blocking the airflow. Examples include B, C, D, F, etc.

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What is a Rime?

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A rime is the part of a syllable that contains the vowel and any following consonants. For example, in the word 'cat', 'at' is the rime.

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What is a Syllable?

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A syllable is a single, unbroken sound of a spoken (or written) word. For example, the word 'banana' has three syllables: ba-na-na.

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What is a Digraph?

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A digraph is a combination of two letters that make one sound, such as 'ch' in 'chop' or 'th' in 'this'.