Phonics Terms for Parents
If your child's teacher is using words like phoneme or grapheme and you want a clear translation, this guide is for you. Think of these terms as the building blocks of the reading code.
The Parent's Phonics Cheat Sheet
| Term | Parent-friendly definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Phoneme | The smallest unit of sound in a word. | In the word cat, there are 3 sounds: /k/ /a/ /t/. |
| Grapheme | The letter (or letters) that represent a sound. | The sound /f/ can be written as f (fish) or ph (phone). |
| Digraph | Two letters that come together to make one sound. | sh, ch, th, ck. |
| Blending | Pushing individual sounds together to say the whole word. | Putting /b/ /a/ /t/ together to say bat. |
| Segmenting | Breaking a whole word down into its individual sounds. | Hearing hop and identifying /h/ /o/ /p/. |
| Heart words | Words with a tricky part that doesn't follow the rules yet. | Words like said or the that children learn by heart. |
Three more terms worth knowing
- Orthographic mapping. How the brain stores a word so it becomes instant. The big moment when reading shifts from slow decoding to fluent reading.
- Decoding. Sounding out a word using the letter-sound pairings you have learned.
- Alphabetic principle. The understanding that letters represent sounds, and those sounds make up words. Everything else in reading sits on top of this.
Want to see this in a real book?
The fastest way to make these terms click is to watch them in action. Try our free parent sampler and you will see how blending, segmenting, and heart words show up on every page of a Set 1 book.