Phonics/Letter and Sounds Query from Clueless Parent

[notyummy]

DD is in reception, one of the youngest but doing pretty well. In particular her reading and writing have come on well, so her and a few others having been going to up to Y1 once a day and doing 'letter and sounds' with them. All fine.

She has recently come home and started writing sentences with dots and dashes underneath the words and has tried to explain to me and DH what they mean (one for a letter sound - one for something else??) But, tbh we don't really grasp what it is about.

Can anyone help?

They indicate the "graphemes" (ways of writing the different sounds).

Synthetic phonics (as in Letters and Sounds) is now considered one of the best ways of teaching children to read. It just means means splitting the words into the smallest units of sound possible. Sometimes a sound (phoneme) may be represented by one letter, for example the letters in cat: ?c?, ?a?, ?t?. Sometimes the sound is represented by two letters (?ch?, ?ai,? ?oy?) or even three or more ( ?igh? and ?ough?). These groups of letters are called graphemes. A single letter grapheme (eg "a") has a dot under it. Graphemes with more than one letter (eg "sh") have a line underneath to remind the child they make one single sound and that they don't sound each letter out individually.

For a full explanation of synthetic phonics and free charts showing all the graphemes and the sounds they can make, Debbie Hepplethwaite's website is very good: www.phonicsinternational.com

Thanks very much - most helpful!

When my DD was in reception they called them sound buttons. So eg. shop has 3 sound buttons "sh" "o" "p".

sound button activity online here www.kenttrustweb.org.uk/kentict/content/games/phaseThreeAS1_v2.html

One letter making one sound is a single phoneme - as in c.
Two letters making 1 sound is a digraph - as in sh.
Three letters making 1 sound is a trigraph - as in igh, air etc.
When sounding words out children often play the Sound Buttons game which is what the dots and dashes are all about. Basically a dot for a single phoneme, a dash for a digraph or trigraph. They press the 'sound buttons' to sound out the words to read or spell them.
If you think that's confusing, wait until she gets to split digraphs and you get dips under the words!!!

abbylou, wwhat are they called when 4 letters make one sound?