Play Makes Sense Phonics Activity Cards on a chair

Phonics Terminology

Phonics Terminology

Using terminology correctly with your child will help them excel in reading and writing and develop a secure understanding of phonics. Take a look at this list of terminology which is included in the Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, Phase 4, Phase 5 and Phase 6 Phonics Activity Cards.
  • Adjective - a word that describes a noun, e.g. brown

 

  • Adverb - a word that describes a verb, e.g. noisily

 

  • Alliteration - words that have the same initial sound

 

  • Alternative graphemes - different ways to write the same sound, e.g. ai, a-e, ay, ei, eigh and ey all make the /ai/ sound

 

  • Base word - the main part of a word with no extra parts added, e.g. happy

 

  • Blending - putting sounds together to read a word

 

  • Compound word - a longer word that is made up of two shorter words, e.g. cowboy - cow and boy

 

  • Consonant - a letter of the alphabet that is not a vowel (a, e, i, o, u)

 

  • Consonant blend word - a word with two adjacent consonants, e.g. hand

 

  • CVC word - a single syllable word with three sounds. CVC words contain a consonant sound, then a vowel sound and then a consonant sound.

 

  • Digraph - two letters that make one sound 

 

  • Grapheme - the written form of a sound, e.g. a letter/s

 

  • Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence - matching the sound to the letter that represents it 

 

  • Homophone - two or more words that are pronounced the same, but have different spellings and meanings, e.g. bear and bare

 

  • Initial Sound - the first sound in a word

 

  • Mnemonic - a sentence or phrase that helps us to spell difficult words, e.g. because - big elephants can’t always use small exits

 

  • Noun - a person, place or thing, e.g. dog

 

  • Oral Blending - putting sounds together to say a word 

 

  • Oral Segmenting - splitting up and saying each individual sound in a word - also known as sound-talk, e.g. c-a-t 

 

  • Past tense - used to describe something that has already happened

 

  • Phoneme - the smallest unit of sound 

 

  • Polysyllabic words - words that have more than one syllable, e.g. armchair, dinosaur, butterfly

 

  • Prefix - a group of letters that go at the beginning of a word and changes its meaning, e.g. un in the word unhappy

 

  • Present tense - used to describe something that is happening now

 

  • Rhyme - words that have the same end sound 

 

  • Segmenting - splitting up sounds to spell a word 

 

  • Split Digraph - two letters, which are not next to each other, that work together to make one sound, e.g. the a and e in cake 

 

  • Suffix - a group of letters that go at the end of a word and changes its meaning, e.g. ly in the word happily

 

  • Syllables - the number of beats in a word 

 

  • Tricky words - words that cannot be sounded out 

 

  • Trigraph - three letters that make one sound

 

  • Verb - a doing word or action, e.g. bark