Every skill, with the words behind it

CVC words are consonant-vowel-consonant words like cat, bed and pin. They are where most readers start, because the vowel says its short sound and every letter maps to one sound in order, so a child can sound the word out left to right without needing any exceptions explained.

A consonant digraph is two consonants that together make one new sound, as in ship, chin, that, when and phone. They matter early because a reader who sounds out s-h will never arrive at ship, so the pair has to be taught as a single unit rather than as two letters.

A blend is two or three consonants read together where each keeps its own sound, as in stop, flag, drum and split. Blends are a fluency skill more than a decoding one: the sounds are already known, and what is new is holding them together fast enough to hear the word.

C says /s/ and g says /j/ when the next letter is e, i or y, which is why city, cent, gem and gym do not start the way cat and got do. It is one of the few English spelling rules that holds almost every time.

Doubled letters make one sound, not two: hill, buzz, off and miss. The double usually marks the vowel before it as short, which makes it a spelling signal rather than a pronunciation one.

Some letter groups resist being sounded out one at a time: all, ing, ank, old and ind. The vowel and what follows fuse into a single chunk, so ball and sing are read as wholes rather than assembled letter by letter.

Knee, write, gnat, lamb and half all carry a letter that is written and not said. Most are fossils of older English where the letter was pronounced, which is why they cluster in particular pairs rather than appearing at random.

Silent e is the first spelling pattern that changes a word a child already reads: cap becomes cape, kit becomes kite. The e at the end makes no sound of its own and reaches back over one consonant to make the vowel say its own name.

When r follows a vowel it changes the vowel's sound entirely: ar in car, or in for, and er, ir and ur all saying the same sound in her, bird and turn. These are neither long nor short, which is why readers who have only met those two categories get stuck here.

A vowel team is two vowels working together for one sound, as in rain, boat, seed and pie. They are the point where sounding out stops being reliable on its own, because the same team can say more than one thing: ea is different in eat, bread and break.

A diphthong is a vowel sound that slides from one position to another inside a single syllable, as in coin, boy, out and cow. Your mouth moves while you say it, which is what separates a diphthong from a vowel team that holds one steady sound.

Y is a consonant at the start of a word, as in yes, and a vowel everywhere else. At the end of a one-syllable word it usually says long i, as in dry, and at the end of a longer word it usually says long e, as in bumpy.

Schwa is the flat uh sound an unstressed vowel collapses into: the a in about, the o in lemon, the e in taken. Any vowel letter can make it, which is why it is the single largest source of spelling errors in English.

A closed syllable ends in a consonant, which closes the vowel in and makes it short: cat, napkin, rabbit. It is the most common syllable type in English and the first one taught, because every CVC word a beginner reads is one.

An open syllable ends in a vowel, and that vowel says its long sound: me, go, ti-ger, ba-by. It is the counterpart to the closed syllable, and the pair together explain why tiger and tigger would be read differently.

Words like table, little, purple and candle end in a consonant plus le. That ending is its own syllable, and it takes the consonant before it, which is why the split is ta-ble rather than tab-le.

Endings like -tion, -sion, -ture and -age behave as fixed units: action, vision, picture, village. They are read as chunks rather than decoded, and they carry the stress pattern of the word with them.

Once a reader knows the syllable types, long words stop being long words and become several short ones. Fantastic is fan-tas-tic, three closed syllables, none of which is harder than a CVC word.

A prefix is a word part added to the front that changes meaning: un- makes a word its opposite, re- makes it happen again, pre- puts it before. The base word underneath stays intact, which makes prefixed words easier to decode than their length suggests.

A suffix is a word part added to the end: jumped, jumping, jumps, quickly, hopeful. Recognising the suffix lets a reader strip it off, read the base word they already know, and put it back.

Adding a suffix often changes the base word: hop becomes hopping, hope becomes hoping, happy becomes happier. Three rules cover most of it, doubling the final consonant, dropping the silent e, and changing y to i.

A contraction joins two words and marks the missing letters with an apostrophe: do not becomes don't, it is becomes it's. Readers meet them early in dialogue, well before they are formally taught.

A compound word is two whole words joined: sunset, cupcake, bedroom. They look long and are not, because both halves are usually words the reader already knows, which makes them a confidence win early on.