The Joy Of Learning

What are phonograms?

Since I mentioned I taught preschooler penmanship and phonograms in my previous post, a few people emailed me and asked me what are phonograms?

A phonogram is a letter or set of letters(multi-letter) which represent a sound.

For example:

• ay is a 2 letter phonogram which says /A/ as in day
• s a single letter phonogram which says /s/ as in sit or /z/ as in has
• ch is a two letter phonogram which says /ch/ as in chair and /k/ as in christmas and /sh/ as in chef
• igh is a three letter phonogram which says /I/ as in high

I am using what commonly known as Spalding Method to teach children spelling their way to writing and reading. I do not use the The Writing Road to Reading by Mrs Romalda Spalding but Spell to Write and Write by Mrs Wanda Senseri, which I feel is more user friendly. Contrary to popular belief, most of the preschools do not teach phonics, or at least not proper phonics, Mrs Wanda Senseri listed out this pseudo phonics program in her Senate Speech. The popular Smart Reader Program has all three elements of Phony, Pokey and Fickle phonics in it.:-)

List of the Phonograms

These are the original 70 phonograms that Romalda Spalding used in her work in the 1950’s

a	b	c	d	e
f	g	h	i	j
k	l	m	n	o
p	qu	r	s	t
u	v	w	x	y
z	ai	ar	au	aw
ay	ch	ci	ck	dge
ea	ear	ed	ee	ei
eigh	er	ew	ey	gn
ie	igh	ir	kn	ng
oa	oe	oi	oo	or
ou	ough	ow	oy	ph
sh	si	tch	th	ti
ui	ur	wh	wor	wr

How Phonograms Work

In spelling, each sound in a word is represented by a phonogram. Let’s take the word plaster. Pronounce the word slowly to hear the individual sounds, and you will hear six different sounds: /p/ - /l/ - /?/-/s/ - /t/-/er/. For each sound, a phonogram is written down: p l a s t er

That was an easy example. Here are some more examples:

• The word kid has three sounds (/k/-/i/-/d/) and three phonograms (k,i, d)
• The word match has three sounds (/m/-/a/-/ch/) and, therefore, three phonograms (m, a, tch)
• The word high has two sounds (/h/-/I/) and, therefore, two phonograms (h, igh)

So you can see that the number of letters in a word doesn’t necessarily correspond to the number of phonograms. Why? Because of the multi-letter phonograms. One sound is represented by one phonogram, but that phonogram may have two or more letters.

The focus is on teaching spelling, the foundation for reading and writing. Children learn seventy phonograms and write, from dictation, the high-frequency Ayres words in a spelling/vocabulary notebook. They learn to reinforce the phonograms and provide oral and written phonogram reviews and spelling dictation.

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