Phonics

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

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word that can distinguish one word from another.

Blending is the process of combining individual sounds (phonemes) to form a word.

Segmenting is the process of breaking a word down into its individual sounds (phonemes).

A grapheme is a written representation of a phoneme, such as a letter or a group of letters.

A digraph is a combination of two letters that make one sound, such as 'sh' in 'ship'.

A blend is a combination of two or more consonants where each sound is heard, such as 'bl' in 'black'.

A vowel is a speech sound in English represented by the letters A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.

A consonant is a speech sound that is not a vowel, represented by all other letters in the alphabet.

A sight word is a word that is recognized instantly without needing to sound it out, often because it appears frequently in text.