Has your child come home from school speaking a different language yet? Phonemes, graphemes, CVC words... Schools teach children to use the technical vocabulary for phonics terms. Here is a quick guide to explain phonemes and graphemes and how to remember which one is which! Phoneme - the smallest unit of sound within a word. Grapheme - a letter or group of letters that represent a phoneme. GPCs There are 44 phonemes (sounds) in the English language and 26 letters (a-z) which

Phonics is a method of teaching children how to read and write by matching what they hear to what they see written down. During Phase 1 your child will explore sounds. In Reception, your child will start Phase 2 where they will begin to match spoken sounds to individual letters or groups of letters that represent one sound. Phonics is the prime approach used in schools to teach early reading and is taught daily. It is taught systematically which means the sounds aren't taught

My children's school send home a look, cover, write, check sheet for spellings. One of my children will happily fill it in, whereas the other one avoids it! We started to play some spelling games instead and made a note on the sheet to say that we had been working on them at home. Here are 10 things you can use instead of a worksheet and a pencil! This post contains Amazon Affiliate links, which are labelled as aff links. Clicking the Amazon links doesn't cost you any extra,

High-frequency words are the words which occur most often in a text. Some of the high-frequency words are decodable which means your child can have a go at sounding them out e.g. a-n-d, and. However, some of the high-frequency words are called tricky words because they are tricky to decode. This is either because they are phonetically irregular or contain a sound your child hasn’t been taught yet e.g. the y in my. Your child will learn to read and spell tricky words during

Segmenting is the opposite of blending and is the technique used to help with spelling. When blending to read words, you push sounds together to make the word, but pull them apart with segmenting. You can help your child to segment words by saying the whole word first and then breaking it into individual sounds. For each sound they hear, ask your child to write a letter to represent the sound. Some sounds are made using 2 letters (digraph) or 3 letters (trigraphs). When segme