First Grade Reading: Part 4

Smartfirstgraders.com has an excellent article on first grade reading.  Below is Phonics: Picking the Words Apart

For first graders, reading is like a code to be deciphered. Kids may know what sounds individual letters make, but it takes skill to sound out the letters accurately and quickly enough to make the text resolve itself into an understandable word.

Phonics is the skill of picking words apart by sound to decipher the individual pieces. Phonics skills include such things as consonant sounds, beginning and ending sounds of words, long and short vowels, and letter combinations. Letter combinations include blends, which put several sounds next to each other as in "str" or "pl", and diagraphs, which combine to make just one sound as in "ph" or "igh".