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The ‘Kid Lips’ cards are phoneme cards; they represent the 44 sounds of English and not the graphemes which are the letters. The graphemes are represented by the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Instructional Cards’ and the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Mini Cards’. The ‘Kid Lips’ cards are designed to be used to introduce the 44 sounds of English, then the graphemes are introduced later. The phoneme /k/ is on the ‘Kid Lips’ consonant card /k/ /g/ for use when the phoneme /k/ is introduced. The lips position for the /k/ and /g/ are the same and that is why they are on one card. The phoneme /k/ is unvoiced and the phoneme /g/ is voiced. We use our voice-box to make the /g/ sound. Choose either the ‘c’ or ‘k’ ‘Phoneme Grapheme Instructional Card’ or the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Mini Card’ to place on your Sound Wall when you first introduce a grapheme to represent the /k/ sound. Both the ‘c’ and ‘k’ cards are provided in the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Instructional Cards’ and the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Mini Cards’ as some people also like to use these cards as an alphabetical order display in their classroom.

The ‘Kid Lips’ cards are phoneme cards; they represent the 44 sounds of English and not the graphemes which are the letters. The graphemes are represented by the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Instructional Cards’ and the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Mini Cards’. The grapheme ‘x’ is made by saying two sounds, /k/ and /s/. Therefore, there is not a card with an ‘x’ as ‘x’ has two sounds /k/ and /s/. The ‘Kid Lips’ cards are designed to introduce the 44 phonemes of English and then the graphemes that represent these sounds are introduced one by one using the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Instructional Cards’ or the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Mini Cards’.

The ‘Kid Lips’ cards are phoneme cards; they represent the 44 sounds of English and not the graphemes which are the letters. The graphemes are represented by the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Instructional Cards’ and the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Mini Cards’. The grapheme ‘qu’ is made by saying two sounds, /k/ and /w/. Therefore, there is not a card with a ‘qu’ as ‘qu’ has two sounds /k/ and /w/. The ‘Kid Lips’ cards are designed to introduce the 44 phonemes of English and then the graphemes that represent these sounds are introduced one by one using the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Instructional Cards’ or the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Mini Cards’.

The ‘Phoneme Grapheme Poster’ displays the main grapheme spellings for the sounds. If you look on the back of the ‘Phoneme Grapheme Instructional Cards’, you will see all the information about the spelling choices. For example, on the apple ‘a’ card the letter ‘a’ is the main spelling for the short sound /ă/. The letter ‘a’ can also make the short sound /ŏ/ after the consonant ‘w’, as 'w' is a vowel modifier. However, the ‘wo’ spelling does not occur frequently and that is why the letter ‘a’ is not on the short ŏ’ card. The ‘Phoneme Grapheme Poster’ also displays the main spellings for instructional purposes.

The short vowels are in red in the 'Phoneme Grapheme Poster', on the 'Phoneme Grapheme Instruction Cards' and on the 'Phoneme Grapheme Mini cards'. The letter ‘u’ makes the short sound /ŏŏ/ in words like pull and push. Due to the letter ‘u’ being a short vowel the ‘l’ is doubled for the ‘floss rule’ as the letter ‘u’ is one short vowel. 'At the end of a one syllable word /l/ is spelt with the grapheme ‘-ll’ immediately after one short vowel.' [See the leaf ‘l’ ‘Phoneme Grapheme Instructional Card’ for more information]

The letters ‘e, i and y’ make the letters ‘c’ and ‘g’ soft, so the letters ‘e, i and y’ are yellow to remind us. The letters ‘e, i and y’ change the letter ‘c’ from a hard /k/ sound (as in cat, cob, cube) to a soft sound /s/ sound (as in cent, city and cyclone). Similarly, the letters ‘e, i and y’ make the letter ‘g’ soft. The letters e, i and y change the letter ‘g’ from a hard /g/ sound (as in gate, gong, and gunk) to a soft sound /j/ sound (as in gent, giant and gymnasium).

The ‘eer’ can be made with /long e/ plus a /Ə/ (a schwa) so we did not include the ‘eer’ in the Australian Version of the Kid Lips cards or guide. It can be argued that ‘eer’ can be treated as a diphthong but there are numerous people with different opinions on this. Australian Speech and Language Pathologist Alison Clarke answers this question beautifully…….. Hi there, I am wondering whether you’d call this pattern a trigraph or a digraph ending in r? I’ve found evidence of both but wanted to know what is grammatically correct for Australia. I also wondered if you’d call ough and augh a tetragraph/quadraph? I am wanting to use correct terms with my students but not sure what to use. Alternatively, would you just refer to these as letter patterns in a primary school context for the purpose of simplicity? Stacey. Hi Stacey, I treat ‘ear’ and ‘air’ as three-letter spellings, but you’re right, they are really /ee/ plus schwa and /e/ plus schwa, so it’s possible to treat them as two sounds. That’s what books from America do, as they pronounce those final letter Rs as /r/, but we pronounce them as unstressed vowels. We have other vowel sounds that are diphthongs, meaning they involve movement from one vowel to another (/ae/ as in take, /ie/ as in time, /oe/ as in home), so I decided to treat ‘ear’ and ‘air’ as diphthongs represented by a single grapheme, whereas I treat combinations of three sounds like the ‘ire’ in fire, ‘our’ in sour and ‘ure’ in ‘pure’ as two separate sounds (a diphthong and a schwa). So the answer is, you could treat them as either, it depends how finely you want to slice sounds and letters, but I decided it was simpler in our accent to treat ‘ear’ and ‘air’ as separate sounds mostly represented by trigraphs (ear as in dear, eer as in beer, ier as in pier, ere as in here, and then air as in hair, are as in care, ere as in there, eir as in their, etc). I usually avoid terms like ‘trigraph’ and ‘quadgraph’ or ‘tetragraph’, some people have objections to them that are well-grounded in linguistics, and anyway for kids it’s just simpler to say ‘three-letter spelling’ and ‘four-letter spelling’. Hope that makes sense! Alison Source: https://www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/ear/ear-as-in-hear/