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