Consonant Blends (Adjacent Consonants) – Speaking and Spelling

Using tiddly frogs for segmenting activity

Systematic Phonics programs now talk of  ‘consonant blends’ or ‘adjacent consonants’, but what are they? Why is it that the letters ‘bl’ in the word ‘black’ are adjacent consonants while ‘ck’ are not? Speech and language therapist, Hema Desai explains the difference and suggests fun, multisensory activities to embed learning. As a speech and language…

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Consonant blends and consonant teams – what’s the difference?

Many of the terms in phonics are quite confusing.  Consonant blends and consonant teams are such terms.  So, what is the difference between the two? A consonant blend is a term used for two adjacent consonants in a word that represent two separate sounds.  Take the word, ‘blog’: the letters ‘b’ and ‘l’ spell two…

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What is a phoneme?

Now that everyone is talking ‘Synthetic Phonics speak’ it seems like a good time to clarify some of the terms  that are being used.

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