By: Tashawna King
Phonics concepts include:
 consonants
 vowels
 blending sounds into words
 phonograms
 phonics rules
 Phonics is the key to reading because without
phonics students would not be able to recognize
words, spell, or be a successful reader. Phonics
involves the association of phonemes, or sounds with
written symbols, called graphemes. Phonics is the
key to word recognition.
When educators talk about phonics,
they are referring method of teaching
beginners to read and pronounce words
by learning to associate letters or letter
groups with the sounds they
represent. Teachers teach the
relationships between phonemes (the
sounds that make up spoken words)
and graphemes (the written
representations of language) so that
students can decode (sound out)
words. Children must learn to break
words down so that they can decode
them in order to read; therefore, phonics
is extremely important.
Teachers have to teach
children to learn the
sounds of the English
language. Teachers
should remember to
choose words that help
children understand all
of the 44 sounds. (19
vowel sounds including
5 long vowels, 5 short
vowels, 3 diphthongs, 2
'oo' sounds, 4 'r'
controlled vowel sounds
and 25 consonant
sounds).
Vowels are five letters in the
alphabet which are a, e, i, o,
u, and sometimes w and y that
represents a
speech sound. Wand y are
vowels when used in the
middle and at the end of
syllables and words. For
example, the word day has the
two phonemes, /d/ and /ā/,
and a and y are vowels.
Interestingly, y is not always a
vowel; it is a consonant at the
beginning of a word and a
vowel at the end.
 The 2 most common vowels are
short (marked with the
symbol ̆, called a breve) and
long sounds (marked with the
symbol ¯, called macron).

Teachers can show students the vowel letter and say the short
vowel sound. For example, tell them "This is 'a' and it says /a/.
Teachers can display pictures that begin with the short vowel
sound. Pictures will help students remember the short vowel
sound. For this sound, use pictures that begin with short "a" such
as apple and ant. Once students understand the short "a" sound,
show them other pictures that contain the short "a" sound such
as hat, bat, and cat. Tape the pictures to the board, write the
words underneath the pictures and underline the letter vowel to
emphasize that sound.
Teachers can display pictures that begin with the
long vowel sound. Pictures will help students
remember the long vowel sound. For this sound, use
pictures that begin with long "a" such as acorn and
apron. Once students understand the long "a"
sound, show them other pictures that contain the
short "a" sound such as snake, cake, and tape. Tape
the pictures to the board, write the words
underneath the pictures and underline the letter
vowel to emphasize that sound.

Two kinds of combination consonants are
blends and digraphs. Consonant
blends occur when two or three
consonants appear next to each other in
words and their individual sounds are
"blended" together, as in grass, belt, and
spring. Examples of consonant blends are
the fr in frame, the cl in click, and
the br in bread. Consonant digraphs are
letter combinations representing single
sounds that are not represented by either
letter; the four most common are ch as in
chair and each, sh as in shell and wish,
th as in father and both, and wh as
in while. Another consonant digraph
is ph, as in photo and graph.

Readers blend or combine sounds in order to
decode words. Even though children may
identify each sound, one by one, they must
also be able to blend them into a word. For
example, to read the short-vowel word best,
children identify /b//ĕ/ /s/ /t/ and the combine
them to form the word. For long-vowel words,
children must identify the vowel pattern as well
as the surrounding letters. In pancake , for
example, children identify /p/ /ă/ /n/ /k/ /ā/
/k/ and recognize that the e at the end of the
word is silent and marks the preceding vowel
as long.
A phonogram is a letter or group of letters that represent a single
sound. One-syllable words and syllables in longer words can be
divided into two parts, the onset and the rime: The onset is the
consonant sound, if any, that precedes the vowel, and the rime is
the vowel and any consonant sounds that follow it. For example,
in show, “sh” is the onset and “ow” is the rime, and in ball, “b” is the
onset and “all” is the rime. For “at” and “up,” their is no onset; the
entire word is the rime. Research has shown that children make
more errors decoding and spelling the rime than the onset and
more errors on vowels than on consonants (Caldwell & Leslie 2005).
In fact, rimes may provide an important key to word identification.
Brought to you by Tashawna King