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Phonemes


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Just working through new letters and sounds and the whole school had an inset on phonics. We have a huge staff made up of lots of TAs and just need to explain the terminology so everyone explains correctly to the children.

Therefore could anyone explain simply what are

phonemes

graphemes

digraphs

clusters

etc

Thank you

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Not sure that clusters is being used now as a term - they are consecutive consonants in phase 4. I.e /s/t/r/ because they are 3 separate phonemes and your mouth changes shape as you articulate them.

 

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. the word e.g.swim has 4 phonemes.

 

A digraph is 2 letters that make 1 phoneme e.g. /ck/ is a consonant digraph and /ea/ is a vowel digraph. Therefore i _e is a split digraph. three letters making 1 sound is a trigraph e.g /dge/

 

CVC, ccvc etc indicates the type of phoneme in the word as you go through the phases eg /s/u/n/

Duck would be a CVC word as it is a consonant, vowel, consonant digraph making 3 separate sounds- /d/u/ck/

 

Pretty sure the glossary is in lettters and sounds too.

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yes they are in glossary but some staff having problems understanding them so just wanted someone to simplify them further if they could.

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Just working through new letters and sounds and the whole school had an inset on phonics. We have a huge staff made up of lots of TAs and just need to explain the terminology so everyone explains correctly to the children.

Therefore could anyone explain simply what are

phonemes

graphemes

digraphs

clusters

etc

Thank you

 

Simpley put -

phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a word c-a-t (3 sounds), sh- i p (3 sounds) r-ai-n (3 sounds)

graphemes are the written representation of the sounds (the written letter)

digraphs are 2 letters that make one sound eg sh ch th ng ai ee ie oa ue, a split digraph is where the vowels are split eg came, same, made, pale trigraphs are 3 letters that make one sound igh dge

clusters are now the new 'adjacent consonsants' in phase 4 and are consonants that are next to each other either at the beginning or end of a word eg stop skin slip frog next milk hand went crisp

 

Hope this doesnt confuse!

 

Good luck

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Just working through new letters and sounds and the whole school had an inset on phonics. We have a huge staff made up of lots of TAs and just need to explain the terminology so everyone explains correctly to the children.

Therefore could anyone explain simply what are

phonemes

graphemes

digraphs

clusters

etc

Thank you

 

I should also have said that I teach my children to use these words so that they are able to define what a digraph is to their parents etc. It's not too difficult, they're really quite good at it! Encourage the TAs to use the correct termminolgy during each session.

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Confusing myself now!!! If you are talking about the word sh-i-p do you say it has 3 phonemes made up of 1 digraph (sh) and what do you call i and p?

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blend (vb) — to draw individual sounds together to pronounce a word, e.g. s-n-a-p, blended together, reads snap

 

cluster — two (or three) letters making two (or three) sounds, e.g. the first three letters of 'straight' are a consonant cluster

 

(vowel) digraph — two letters making one sound, e.g. sh, ch, th, ph. Vowel digraphs comprise two vowels which, together, make one sound, e.g. ai, oo, ow

 

split digraph — two letters, split, making one sound, e.g. a-e as in make or i-e in site

 

grapheme — a letter or a group of letters representing one sound, e.g. sh, ch, igh, ough (as in 'though')

 

grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) — the relationship between sounds and the letters which represent those sounds; also known as 'letter-sound correspondences'

 

mnemonic — a device for memorising and recalling something, such as a snake shaped like the letter 'S'

 

phoneme — the smallest single identifiable sound, e.g. the letters 'sh' represent just one sound, but 'sp' represents two (/s/ and /p/)

 

segment (vb) — to split up a word into its individual phonemes in order to spell it, e.g. the word 'cat' has three phonemes: /c/, /a/, /t/

 

VC, CVC, CCVC — the abbreviations for vowel-consonant, consonant-vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, and are used to describe the order of letters in words, e.g. am, Sam, slam.

 

 

http://www.getreadingright.com/synthetic_p...cs_glossary.htm might also be useful

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Gwen

 

There is also a phonic training powerpoint available on the Literacy section of the Lancs grid for learning, under phonics (I think). that's useful. you can delete all of the irrelevant slides and simplify the terms. I used it to train the teachers and TAs in my school (am literacy co-ord). it's useful to explain blending and segmenting

etc.

Sorry i don't have the technical skill to add the link here.

 

xx

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