This week, your child will be learning the letters s, a, t, p, i, n and the sounds they make.
The children will be taught some of the terminology we use. So that you don’t feel left out, here are a few definitions:
- A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word.
- A grapheme is the letter, or letters, representing a phoneme, such as t, ai, igh, ch.
- A digraph is two letters, making one sound; a consonant digraph contains two consonants (sh, ck, th), whilst a vowel digraph contains at least one vowel (ai, ee, ar, oy).
- A trigraph is three letters making one sound, like igh, dge.
- Blending is recognising the letter sounds in a written word (for example c-u-p), and merging or synthesising them in the order in which they are written to pronounce the word ‘cup’ (this is essential during the reading process).
- Segmenting is the opposite of blending; it involves identifying the individual sounds in a spoken word (eg ‘him’ = h – i – m) and writing down letters for each sound to form the word (segmenting supports the writing process).
- A c-v-c word is a consonant, vowel, consonant word such as c-a-t and also sh-o-p.
Encourage your child to read and write cvc words, especially using letters and sounds that you know we’ve covered in school – this week, lots of words can be blended and segmented using s, a, t, p, i, n.