What are phonemes and graphemes?Updated 2 years ago

Phonemes are the individual sounds that make up a spoken word, like the /f/ sound in funny. There are 44 phonemes in English. Just like building fortresses out of Lego blocks, phonics encourages children to break down words into their individual phonemes (segmenting) and then put the phonemes back together again to form words (blending).

Graphemes are letters and combinations of letters that represent phonemes in written language. There are more graphemes than phonemes in English – 200, to be precise – because there are multiple ways to write the same sound, e.g. the phoneme /f/ can be written as f, ff or ph.

Find our more in our Phonics Deep Dive: https://mrswordsmith.com/en-gb/pages/science-of-reading