At Cosgrove Village Primary School we follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds programme to support phonics teaching.  Our children start learning their phonic sounds in the Autumn in Reception class. 

• blend (vb)
• • to draw individual sounds together to pronounce a word, e.g. s-n-a-p, blended together, reads snap
• cluster
  • two (or three) letters making two (or three) sounds, e.g. the first three letters of 'straight' are a consonant cluster
• digraph
  • two letters making one sound, e.g. sh, ch, th, ph.
  • vowel digraphs comprise of two vowels which, together, make one sound, e.g. ai, oo, ow
• split digraph
  • two letters, split, making one sound, e.g. a-e as in make or i-e in site
• grapheme
  • a letter or a group of letters representing one sound, e.g. sh, ch, igh, ough (as in 'though')
• grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC)
  • the relationship between sounds and the letters which represent those sounds; also known as 'letter-sound correspondences'
• mnemonic
  • a device for memorising and recalling something, such as a snake shaped like the letter 'S'
• phoneme
  • the smallest single identifiable sound, e.g. the letters 'sh' represent just one sound, but 'sp' represents two (/s/ and /p/)
• segment (vb)
  • to split up a word into its individual phonemes in order to spell it, e.g. the word 'cat' has three phonemes: /c/, /a/, /t/
• VC, CVC, CCVC
  • the abbreviations for vowel-consonant, consonant-vowel-consonant, consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, which are used to describe the order of letters in words, e.g. am, ham, slam.

If you would like to help your child with phonics you can visit these websites www.phonicsplay.co.uk or www.letters-and-sounds.com - which helps their learning in a fun way!

You can also visit: www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/