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