Introduction to Letter Sounds

English phonics

These 42 letter sounds are phonic building blocks that children, with the right tools, use to decode the English language.

 When reading a word, they recognize the letters and blend together the respective sounds; when writing a word they identify the sounds and write down the corresponding letters. These skills are called blending and segmenting. 

These are two of the five skills that children need to master phonics

1 .Learning the letter sounds:

Children are taught 42 letter sounds, which is a mix of alphabet sounds (1 sound – 1 letter) and digraphs (1 sound – 2 letters) such as sh, th, ai and ue.  

2 .Learning letter formation:

This is taught alongside the introduction of each letter sound. Typically, children will learn how to form and write the letters letter down during the course of the lesson.



3 .Blending:

Once the first few letter sounds are learnt, children begin blending the sounds together to help them read and write new words. 

4 .Segmenting:

When children start reading words, they also need to start identifying the phonic components that make the word sound the way it does. By teaching blending and segmenting at the same time children become familiar with assembling and breaking down the sounds within words.

5 Tricky words

These are words with irregular parts, such as ‘who’ and ‘I’. Children learn these as exceptions to the rules of phonics.