Phonics and Sound Buttons
Phonics: Phonics is a method for teaching children how to read and write in an
alphabetic language such as English. It helps children to hear, identify and use
different sounds that distinguish one word from another in the English
language.
Set 1: s, a, t, p
Set 2: i, n, m, d
Set 3: g, o, c, k
Set 4: ck, e, u, r
Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss
Set 6: j, v, w, x
Set 7: y, z, zz, qu
Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng
Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er
Terminology
Phonics: Using the sounds made by individual letters and groups of letters to
read words.
Decoding: Using your phonic knowledge to sound out and read words.
Grapheme: A written letter or group of letters, like ‘s’, ‘a’, ‘she’ or ‘air’. Some
graphemes are single letters like ‘a’; others are digraphs like ‘ai’.
Digraph: Two letters that make one sound together, like ‘sh’, ‘ai’, ‘oo’.
Phoneme: The sound a letter or group of letters make – e.g. the word ‘mat’ has
three phonemes, ‘m’, ‘a’ and ‘t’. The word ‘through’ is longer, but it also has three
phonemes, ‘th’, ‘r’ and the ‘oo’ sound in ‘ough’.
Sounding out: Using your phonic knowledge to help you say each sound within a
word, e.g. ‘r-e-d’ or ‘s-au-ce-p-a-n’.
Blending: Running the sounds in the word together to read the whole word, e.g.
‘r-e-d, red’, ‘s-au-ce-p-a-n, saucepan’.
High-frequency words (also known as ‘common exception words’): The very
important, very common words that we use a lot, but which aren’t always
decodable using phonics. This includes crucial words like ‘the’, ‘one’, ‘where’, etc.
Children are taught to recognise these words on sight – a few of these words
are introduced and learnt at a time.
What are Sound Buttons? Sound buttons are visual aids that assist children in
dissecting a word into its individual graphemes. Functioning as dots and dashes
beneath a word, these cues aid students in breaking down the word into its
distinct sounds, in order to put the sounds together to form the word.
Dots go under letters that represent their own sounds, while digraphs —
combinations of letters that form one sound, such as ph or qu — are
represented with dashes.
Single Letter-Sound Relationships: Each letter is
marked by a dot or button. Children can be
encouraged to ‘press’ each button as they sound a
word out, and then run their finger under the word as
they blend the sounds together.
Digraphs and Trigraphs: Where more than one letter
makes a single sound its button is a line. This is for
consonant or vowel digraphs or trigraphs.
Split Digraphs: Split digraphs are given an arc linking
the two grapheme letters. The last letter is making
the earlier short vowel into a long vowel.
Doubled Letters: Where a letter is doubled, because
it is a ‘short vowel double’ or had been doubled
because of the addition of a suffix, then the letters
are underlined together. This shows that the sound is
heard only once.
Prefixes or Suffixes: As prefixes and suffixes are
learnt ‘chunks’ that are not individually sounded out we
double underline these. This shows we are not using
sounds to read or write these affixes.
Prefixes and Suffixes: Where a word has more than
one suffix, or has a prefix and a suffix, both affixes
will be double underlined. This helps children
recognise the base or root word. It also makes the
morphology of complex words clear.
