Please find below some definitions of words you may come across in Spelling homework.

Grapheme: it's a written letter or a group of letters which represent one single sound (phoneme) e.g. a, l, sh, air, ck.

Phoneme: it's a single sound that can be made by one or more letters - e.g. s, k, z, oo, ph, igh.

Segment: it's the opposite of blending as it means splitting a word up into individual sounds when spelling and writing.

Blend: this is when you say the individual sounds that make up a word and then merge or blend them together to say the word as used when reading.

Digraph: this describes two letters which together make one sound e.g. ee, oa, ea, ch, ay.

There are different types of digraph:

• Vowel digraph: a digraph in which at least one of the letters is a vowel: boat or day.
• Consonant digraph: two consonants which can go together: shop or thin.
• Split digraph (previously called magic e): two letters, which work as a pair to make one sound, but are separated within the word e.g. a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e, u-e. For example cake or pine.

Trigraph: this is when three letters go together to make one sound e.g. ear, air, igh, dge, tch.