Hi and welcome back to Family Phonics. In this video I'll be introducing graphemes. In the last video we introduced phonemes, the smallest sounds that can change a word's meaning. In this video we introduce graphemes as a way of recording sounds in writing and print. The letter or group of letters that represent phonem is called its graphene. Children often begin by noticing graphemes that are common, useful or meaningful to them, such as the letters representing the first sound in their name. A few of the most common phonem graphene pairs in English are s-e-t-e-e and-n. Learning which grapheme goes with which phoneme is a multi-sensory learning experience for your child. They will see the grapheme and hear the phoneme. You can enrich this learning further by adding actions, rhymes and songs and physical resources. Making practice active and playful helps children to make stronger connections in their learning. Some phonemes are easier to match with their grapheme than others. There are 47 phonemes in the English language and only 26 letters, so sometimes we need to use a group of letters to represent a single phoneme. Here's the grapheme that commonly represents s-e. It has two letters but only represents one phoneme. We call graphemes with two letters a die graph and there are lots of those in English. Here's a grapheme that can represent the i sound in night. This one has three letters, it's called a trigraph. When your child begins learning funnics they will learn the most common ways that each phoneme can be represented. Of course there are often many ways of representing the same phoneme. Letters on paper are not intended to represent only sound, they are words with meaning and phonics is not the only tool your child will need to learn in order to learn to spell. So if it can lead to spelling mistakes why is phonics an important strategy for my child to learn? Let's have a look at the traditional C and C approach to learning to read. If I learn to recognize the words pin and set then I can write the words pin and set. If however I learn to recognize the graphemes for the phonemes s-e-t-e and mmm then I can write a whole lot more. Funnics speeds up the very early stages of reading and gives children the confidence to try new words as they build their early reading and writing skills. In this video we've seen that a grapheme can be a single letter or a group of letters that represent a phoneme. In the next section of our course you'll learn some practical ways you can help your child build up the connections between phonemes and graphemes.