Key Vocabulary for Phonics Teaching
Blending: Building words for reading by pushing together all the phonemes or sounds in the word.
Common Exception Words (Red words /Tricky words): Thesewords cannot be segmented into sounds.Children need to learn these words by sight.
Digraph: A two letter grapheme where two letters represent one phoneme or sound eg ar, ea, er, oi, ch, th
Fred Talk : To say the individual sounds that make up the word.
Fred Fingers: A way for children to physically sound out each sound in a word to support reading as well as spelling.
Grapheme: The letter or letters that are used to write a phoneme.
Long vowel sound: The sound that is like the names of the vowel letters. The long vowel sounds are often represented in more than one way by digraphs and trigraphs eg main, stay, cake, see, seat, mice, light, coat, bone, glue, spoon.
Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound in a word. Phonemes may be written with more than one letter eg day. The word start has 4 phonemes - s - t - ar - t. The word church has 3 phonemes - ch - ur - ch. The word strap has 5 phonemes - s - t - r - a - p.
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.
Short vowel sound: The sound that the letters a, e, i, o, u make in a word eg cat, peg, hit, not, sun.
Split Vowel Digraph: A two letter grapheme that represent a vowel phoneme or sound where the sounds are pushed apart by another letter. It is used for the long vowel sounds.
Trigraph: A three letter grapheme where three letters represent one phoneme or sound eg air, igh, ear
Vowel Digraph: A two letter grapheme that represents a vowel phoneme or sound eg ay, ee, oi