About this activity
Sixteen words covering four digraphs in both positions: ship, shell, fish and wash for sh; chip, chair, beach and lunch for ch; thin, think, bath and tooth for th; whale, wheel, when and white for wh. A digraph is two letters making one sound, and the reason it needs its own board is that children who know each letter separately will try to say both.
How to use it in a session
Say the sound and show the two letters together, repeatedly. The confusion this board addresses is the child who reads ship as s-hip, and the fix is presenting the pair as one unit visually. Do sh first — it is the most stable and the easiest to hear — then ch, then th, and leave wh for last since in most accents it now sounds like /w/ anyway, which is worth saying rather than pretending otherwise.
What to listen for
Listen for th specifically. It is the last of these to develop in speech and the one most often replaced with /f/ or /d/, so thin becoming fin and bath becoming baf are expected in younger children rather than errors to be alarmed by. Watch the final-position words — fish, beach, bath, tooth — since a digraph at the end of a word is harder than one at the start for both reading and speech.
Carrying it home
Digraph words are everywhere: fish, shell, chair, bath, white. Pointing to the two letters and saying the one sound is a five-second interaction that reinforces the whole idea.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- First and second, where digraphs are a core phonics expectation.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all sixteen words play with no login.
- My student says 'fin' for 'thin'. Is that a reading problem?
- Usually a speech one, and often a typical developmental pattern at this age. /th/ is among the last sounds to develop, and a child who reads the word correctly and says it as fin is decoding fine.