Literacy Learning  - Home Connections

In today’s Literacy Learning section, we thought we would look at some literacy vocabulary from the current Language curriculum that might not be familiar to all families.  These definitions are from ONlit, a comprehensive hub of foundational literacy resources for educators that aligns with the Ontario curriculum.

Phoneme: A phoneme is a sound in a language. In English, there are around 44 sounds or phonemes that make up our spoken language. We use these sounds when we speak.

Grapheme: A grapheme is the letter or combination of letters that represent phonemes, or sounds. Some graphemes are single letters, like or

, but some are combinations of more than one letter, like or .

Consonant digraph: A consonant digraph is a group of 2 consonants that combine to represent one sound. For example, the word cash has the digraph and are combined to make one sound.

Consonant blend: A consonant blend is a group of consonants where each consonant keeps its sound. For example, the word slip has the blend made of /s/ /l/. Blends can have more than 2 sounds (spring), and can be found at the beginning and end of words (clap, west).

Consonant and vowel notation: As students are learning to read, we carefully sequence the types of words students practice reading. Sometimes you will see educators use C and V to describe word patterns. This notation is used to show how many sounds are in a word, and what types of sounds are in a word:

CV: consonant-vowel, like me

VC: vowel-consonant, like at

CVC: consonant-vowel-consonant, like sit

CCVC: consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant, like slip

CVCC: consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant, like west

For more, check out ONlit’s glossary for parents and caregivers.