You know as an SLP that you are qualified to treat reading and you are super interested in learning how to do it but some of the terms seem a little intimidating. Well that's okay! It's time to dive into the terms and what they actually mean.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a spoken word. For example the word "ship" has three phonemes: ʃ, /ɪ/, /p/.
A grapheme is the letter or letters that represent one phoneme. Let's use the word "ship" as an example. "Ship" has three graphemes: sh (digraph), i (vowel), and p (consonant).
• ships: more than one ship as in "I see all the ships in the harbor."
• ships: third person singular present tense of the verb ship as in "He ships the package today."
Remember, English is a morpho-phonemic language, which means our spelling system represents two things at once: sounds and meaning!
Keep this blog as a reference for your future literacy kids & for a deeper dive into all things morphemes and phonemes (and products to support these goals) check out bjorem literacy.
