Phonics Activity Cards with Alphabet

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

  • Capital letter - the type of letter used at the beginning of a sentence, or for the first letter of a proper noun, e.g.  A, B, C

  • 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

  • Contraction - two words that are put together to make a shortened form, e.g., could not - couldn't

  • 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

  • Lowercase letter - the type of letter used most often, apart from the first letter at the beginning of a sentence or the first letter of a proper noun, e.g. a, b, c

  • 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 

  • Phonological awareness - the ability to listen to, play around with and manipulate sounds 

  • 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 

  • Sound button - a dot placed underneath a single letter sound
  • Sound line - a line placed underneath a sound containing more than one letter

  • 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

  • Two-syllable words - words that have two syllables, e.g. lipstick, hairbrush or rooftop

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

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