Phonics

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What is Phonics?

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Phonics is a method of teaching reading and writing by developing learners' phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in spoken words.

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What is a Phoneme?

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A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. For example, the word 'cat' has three phonemes: /k/, /æ/, and /t/.

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What is a Grapheme?

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A grapheme is a letter or a group of letters that represent a phoneme. For example, the grapheme 'sh' represents the phoneme /ʃ/ as in 'shoe'.

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What does it mean to Blend sounds?

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Blending sounds means to combine individual sounds to form a word. For example, blending the sounds /d/, /o/, and /g/ makes the word 'dog'.

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What is Segmenting?

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Segmenting is the process of breaking a word down into its individual sounds. For example, the word 'bat' can be segmented into /b/, /æ/, and /t/.

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What is a Vowel?

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A vowel is a letter that represents a speech sound made with the vocal tract open. The vowels in English are A, E, I, O, U.

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What is a Consonant?

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A consonant is a letter that represents a speech sound made by partially or completely blocking the airflow. Examples include B, C, D, F, etc.

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What is a Digraph?

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A digraph is a combination of two letters that make one sound, such as 'ch' in 'chair' or 'th' in 'this'.

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What is a Blend?

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A blend is a group of two or three consonants that are pronounced together, where each consonant sound can be heard, like 'bl' in 'black'.

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What is a Rime?

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A rime is the part of a syllable that contains the vowel and any following consonants. For example, in the word 'cat', 'at' is the rime.