We hope the following glossary is useful to you - always feel free to come in and talk to us if you require any further support.

 

Blending is the skill of joining sounds together to read words.  Children are taught to say the separate sounds in a word and to then blend them together to decode the word.

 

A digraph is a sound that is represented by two letters e.g. the sound 'a' in rain is represented by the digraph 'ai'.

 

A grapheme is a visual representation of a sound e.g. a letter or a group of letters.  Some sounds are represented by a single letter whilst others are represented by more than one letter.

 

A phoneme is a unit of sound e.g. the word 'cat' contains three phonemes; c - a - t

 

Segmenting is the opposite of blending. Children are taught to segment a word into its separate sounds in order to spell it.