Understanding how words are spelled

Do you know what digraphs are?

Digraphs are 'teams of two letters' that we use to accurately represent pronunciation.

di (meaning 'two') + graph (meaning 'to write') --> digraph

English spelling has many different digraphs and they can have more than one job!

We are investigating the digraph <ch>. 

We identified the words in this written passage that contained the digraph <ch>.

We discovered that <ch> can represent three different phonemes, like;

<church> <chef> and <school>

As 'word dectectives' we went searching for words in the classroom and in books that contained the digraph <ch>. We had to decide which phoneme they were representing and write the words in the correct column.

Understanding that digraphs can have more than one job (to represent different pronunciations) is a very important part of understanding how to spell in English.