--- title: Sounds and letters: how phonics starts — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Sounds and letters: how phonics starts», a lesson of the english course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Every letter has a name and a sound. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/) / Sounds and letters: how phonics starts # Sounds and letters: how phonics starts Lesson 1 of the english course of Mova's primary school: 24 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/0/) — Every letter has a name and a sound. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/2/) — When Miss Adebayo holds up the snake card and hisses «sssss», the snake is showing the sound; «ess» is only the letter's name. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/3/) — Reading starts from the sounds, because sounds glue together and names do not. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/4/) — Say /k/ /a/ /t/ faster and faster and it becomes «cat»; say «see-ay-tee» as fast as you like and it never turns into «cat». - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/5/) — Gluing sounds into a word is called blending. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/6/) — English has 26 letters but about 44 sounds (the exact number changes a little with accent), so some sounds need a team of letters. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/7/) — «sh» in «ship» is two letters making one sound, a digraph; «igh» in «night» is three letters making one sound, a trigraph. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/8/) — Ruby thought that was cheating, but the letters are simply working as a team. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/9/) — Schools teach the sounds in a planned order, in stages called phases or sets. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/10/) — First come s, a, t, p, i, n, because with just those six a child can already read «sat», «pin», «tap» and «nap». - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/11/) — Made-up «alien words» like «zib» are read on purpose: they show a child is really reading the sounds and not guessing a word they remember. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/12/) — People learn and speak differently and are still right. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/13/) — Mum in London and Mom in Texas spell that word their own country's way; a girl who speaks Arabic at home learns English sounds on top; Grandad in Glasgow, who learned whole words by their shape, can still help by reading stories aloud. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/14/) — And a big sister who calls phonics «mid» (teen slang for boring) used it herself, and still does, fast and silently. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/15/) — Every letter has a name (ay, bee, see) and a sound (/a/, /b/, /k/); for reading, the sound comes first. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/17/) — A phoneme is one sound in a word; a grapheme is the letter or letters that write that sound. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/18/) — English has 26 letters but about 44 sounds, so some sounds are written with letter teams. - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/19/) — A digraph is two letters making one sound (sh, ch, th, ng, and ee in «sheep»); a trigraph is three letters making one sound (igh, air). - [22](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/22/) — Schools teach sounds in a fixed order (phases or sets), starting with s, a, t, p, i, n, so children can read real words from the first week. - [23](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/23/) — Reading made-up «alien words» such as «zib» proves a child is decoding the sounds, not guessing from memory. - [24](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/24/) — Phonics is teaching reading by matching sounds to letters; many grown-ups learned whole words by their shape instead, but phonics lets a child work out words they have never seen. - [25](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/25/) — Fluent readers still use phonics, fast and silently, and slow down to it when they meet a hard new word. - [26](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/26/) — Children who speak another language at home sort out the sounds fine; a home language does not hold back English reading. - [27](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/1-sounds-and-letters-how-phonics-starts/27/) — «Mum» (Britain) and «mom» (USA) are both correct spellings in their own country. - next →: [Blending, segmenting and the Year 1 check](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/2-blending-segmenting-and-the-year-1-check/) - ↑ back to [English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/english/)