Digraphs

After the English reading student learns the short vowel sounds and the long vowel rule, the student should be introduced to the concept of digraphs. There are vowel digraphs, and there are consonant digraphs.

The vowel digraphs, for the most part follow the long vowel rule. For example, ‘ea’ and ‘ee’ usually indicate the long e sound. ‘Oa’ says the long o sound, and ‘ue’ usually indicates the long u sound. Additionally, ‘ie’ sometimes says the long i sound, as in the word ‘pie’, but it can also say the long e sound as in the words ‘piece’ and ‘niece’.

There are also consonant digraphs that change the sound of the consonant, such as, ‘ch’ ,’gh’, ‘ph’, ‘sh’, and ‘th’. example words of all of these can be taught as sight words: such, much, tough, rough, graph, phone, she, shell, the, and thing.

How I Communicate Online

Bloganuary writing prompt
In what ways do you communicate online?
View all responses

What does that question mean? I mean, define “Online” first. Because if you mean electronically? Or do you mean over the Internet? And then, what do you mean by “What ways?” You mean like, hostile? Polite? Roundabout? Direct? And another question I have is, are you asking when it is appropriate to communicate online?

Generally, I try to communicate directly but politely both by text and by email, but sometimes I get really obnoxious. That covers two ways. Then there’s this blog, which is at this time includes third person and first-person narrative and the informative voice. Finally, I would say that in the U.S. most people are always at liberty to communicate online, though it requires money, and there are certain times when it is not advisable. Like when you are in a class at an institution of learning, or when you are eating and drinking and run the risk of spilling on your devices. I could go on and on, but I tire….

Vowels

So, once you learn the basic consonant sounds, it’s time to study vowels. Vowels are like consonants in that they have a basic sound, but unlike consonants in that they change their sound when they are close together. The basic sound of a vowel is called the ‘short vowel sound’.

a=/a/ as in ‘Cat’

e=/eh/ as in ‘Elephant’

i=/ih/ as in ‘It’

o=/ah/ as in ‘Octopus’

u=/uh/ as in ‘Under’

y=/euh/ as in ‘Yellow’

When vowels are close together, as they are in the word C-U-T-E, the first vowel usually becomes a ‘long vowel’, and the second vowel usually becomes silent. Here is a song about that: Mr. B’s Short and Long Vowels

Three Aspects of Reading English:

There are basically three aspects of mastering the ability to read English. These are, using word attack skills, using sight word skills, and using comprehension skills. Word attack includes learning letter sounds and variations, all the way to learning root words, prefixes and suffixes. Using sight words requires some memorization of small words that one can not sound-out using letter sounds. Examples of sight words are, “the”, “they”, and “come”. In other words, the reading student will benefit by memorizing short sight words, knowing that these words do not follow the rules of letter sounds and combinations. Finally, comprehension is the goal of all reading. It is good to be able to read and spell, but it is BEST to be able to use reading as a tool for understanding,

More about this to come, but for now, let’s wrap it up with a video: https://youtu.be/rwxWKP4Ld8s.