CVC Words:

Just after teaching Letter sounds introduce vowels. The 5 vowels and their sounds are very important as it will help in word pronunciation.

CVC words help introduce children to reading by first learning the sounds of the individual letters, then blending of vowels with consonants. Apart from blending also teach segmenting of sounds from a cvc or 3 letter word. Segmenting means to identify individual sound in word. Identifying beginning, middle, end sound are a part of learning CVC words.

Blends:

Blends  refer to two consonant that appear at the beginning of a word,  such as bl-, br-, cl-, cr-, fl-, etc. These two consonant sounds are blended to read them together.

Digraphs:

A digraph is two letters that make one sound. The digraph can be made up of vowels or consonants.

There is difference between a blend and a digraph. In a blend, each letter retains its individual sound. For example, in the word crab, you can still hear the individual /c/ and /r/ sounds in the “cr” blend. This is different from a digraph. A digraph is a two-letter combination that represents a single sound like ch in chip.

Final Blends

Like beginning blends here is the list of some important and frequent final blends.

R controlled vowels.

An r-controlled vowel is any vowel followed by letter r. The r changes the sound that vowel makes. R controlled vowels are often called “Bossy R” because the r takes over and makes the vowel make a new sound. The er, ir, and ur all make the same sound /er/ as in her, bird, and fur. Ar usually makes the sound in far. Or usually makes the sound in nor.

Dipthongs:

two vowel sounds that are pronounced together to make one sound, for example the ou sound in ‘house’

Long Vowel Sounds:

Vowels have short and long sound.Long vowel sounds are vowels that are pronounced the same as their name.Long vowels are very common but they can be tricky because there are so many spellings for each long vowel sound. And unfortunately there are hardly any rule which tells which one to use.

Trigraphs:

Trigraph is a group of three letters representing one sound, for example air, tch etc. Trigraphs can consist of all consonants, a mixture of consonants and …vowels.

Important Sound Units:

Few more spelling patterns that are common are listed here. Learning them will help in reading bigger words.

Apart from these phonic topics, include sight words in the reading practice. As 75% – 80% of English sentences has sight words , learning them boost the confidence of the reader and improves their fluency.