With the introduction of the new English curriculum in K-2 this year, reading has been revised and refined to incorporate the most up-to date evidence-based strategies to explicitly teach our students to read. As part of my role, I am in and out of each class during the week, involved in literacy or numeracy lessons. I thought it might be a great idea to share with you what we are learning in our classes and an insight into the vocabulary that we use when teaching students to read. This week I thought I might start at the beginning.
What are phonemes and graphemes?
Students start by learning phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest unit of sounds in speech. Graphemes are the letters used to represent these phonemes.
An example of this would be d/o/g – 3 phonemes or d/u/ck – also 3 phonemes, it is not determined by the number of letters but the sounds that are produced. The final grapheme in duck is ‘ck’ which produces the ‘k’ phoneme.
Another example of this would be ‘th’ – this grapheme has 2 letters, but the phoneme is pronounced as ‘th’ (as in thin). The word ‘thin’ has 3 phonemes and graphemes th/i/n.
As students, learn more phonemes, they come to realise that some phonemes can be represented by multiple graphemes and some graphemes can be represented by multiple phonemes – what a confusing language we learn!
An example of this would be the phoneme ‘i’ (as in pie, cry, night, time, trifle) or the grapheme ea (heal, head, break)
Students learn these phonemes from K-2, increasing in complexity. They learn to blend these phonemes to read words and segment phonemes to spell words in their writing. Each class teacher in K-2 explicitly teaches new phonemes each week and revises phonemes taught throughout the year. Students apply this knowledge to their reading and writing every day.
Ask your child, which phoneme they have learnt today?
Cheryl Wacker
Assistant Principal, Curriculum & Instruction
