Here are some of the meanings of some of the words used to talk about phonics.
What is blending?
Blending means putting sounds together to read a word. For example, /c/ /a/ /t/ → cat
What are CVC words?
CVC words are words made up of a consonant–vowel–consonant pattern, such as dog or cat.
What is a digraph and a trigraph?
There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet, so some sounds are made using two or three letters together, like: ch in chip, sh in ship, igh in night.
A digraph is when two letters work together to make one sound, such as sh, ch, th, or and ai.
A trigraph is three letters that make one sound, such as ire in fire and ear in hear.
What is segmenting?
Segmenting means breaking a word into its separate sounds to help with spelling. For example, dog → /d/ /o/ /g/
What are sound buttons?
A sound button is a small dot or line drawn under each sound in a word to help children see the separate sounds in a word.
What is a grapheme?
A grapheme is a written letter or group of written letters that represents one sound (a phoneme) in a word. For example:
The sound /s/ can be written with the grapheme s as in sun.
The sound /ai/ can be written with the grapheme ai as in rain, or ay as in day.
So, a grapheme is what we see written down, and a phoneme is what we hear.
What is a phoneme?
In English, there are about 44 different sounds that children learn in phonics. These sounds are called phonemes.
What are pure sounds?
Pure sounds are the clean, clear sounds of phoneme — said without adding an extra “uh” sound on the end. For example:
The sound for t is /t/, not “tuh.”
The sound for m is /m/, not “muh.”
The sound for s is /s/, not “suh.”
Using pure sounds helps children hear the individual sounds in words more easily, which makes it simpler for them to blend the sounds together when reading (for example, c-a-t → cat).
What is a split digraph?
A split digraph is a digraph that is split by another letter, such as a–e in cake or i–e in bike.