Jargon for Parents

We do use technical terms when teaching the children in phonics and throughout the day, to support their reading and writing.

Phoneme – the smallest unit of sound

Grapheme – the written letters that represent a phoneme

Diagraph – 2 letters that are combined to make a single sound e.g. sh, ay

Trigraph – 3 letters that are combined to make a single sound e.g. igh, ear

Sound talk – saying each sound in turn from a word, e.g. ch-i-p (we often call this robot talk in school)

Blend – putting sounds together to read a word

Segment – splitting a word into sounds to help with spelling