The answer is most likely, nope! And, you may not even know what a phoneme is. Guess what? That is a-ok. You weren't really taught what a phoneme was in your undergrad unless you have a speech and language degree.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound heard by our ears. We associate phonemes or sounds with letters. Wanna know something else? Those letters that spell the phonemes are actually called graphemes. Here is an example. The short /i/ phoneme can be spelled with the grapheme i as in pig. The long /I/ phoneme can be spelled with the graphemes i, igh, ie, and then of course iCe like in the words hi, light, pie, and nice.
Students need to know all 44 phoneme sounds and their corresponding graphemes in order to spell and read. Here is a great 2-pager that lists the most common phonemes and their corresponding graphemes. How many did you know? How many do your students know?
Happy Learning!
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