Phonics for homeschool moms. Phonemic awareness. Digraphs. Phonological awareness. Phoneme isolation. Phoneme substitution. CVC words. Graphemes. Trigraphs. Decoding. Encoding. If it sounds like I’m speaking another Language, I’ll bet you’re not alone!
Homeschool moms, it’s time to demystify phonics terms, so that you can increase your confidence in teaching your child to read. Phonemic awareness, Digraphs, Phoneme isolation, CVC words, Graphemes, Decoding and Encoding.
Phonics for Homeschool Moms (7 Must-Know Terms)
- Phonemic awareness is the ability of your child to hear the smallest units of sounds (also called phonemes) in a Language.
- Digraphs are letter teams that make one sound. There are consonant digraphs and vowel digraphs. An example of a consonant digraph is ‘sh’ that spells the sound /sh/. An example of a vowel digraph is the vowel team ‘ea’ which spells the long /e/ sound.
- Phoneme isolation is the ability of your child to identify a phoneme (or letter sound) in a word. In the word ‘bat’, can your child identify the middle phoneme, short /a/? The final phoneme /t/?
- CVC words are simple words for early readers in the consonant-vowel-consonant pattern. Examples of CVC words are ‘cat’, ‘tip’ and ‘hop’.
- Graphemes are symbols that represent sounds. For example, the letter ‘t’ is the grapheme that represents the /t/ sound.
- Decoding (reading) is the ability of your child to look at individual graphemes in words, recall the phoneme (or sounds) that letter represents, and blend these sounds to read a word.
- Encoding (spelling) is the ability of your child to hear individual sounds in words, and write the correct grapheme(s) (letters) that represent those sounds.
