How to teach Digraphs in an Engaging and Explicit way

Teaching digraphs explicitly is important so that students recognise that the letters come together to make one sound. This allows them to read more fluently rather than trying to sound each letter individually. This post will briefly cover what a digraph is, why it is important to teach digraphs and how to teach digraphs to your students using activities and games.

WHAT IS A DIGRAPH?

A digraph is two letters that go together to make to one sound (phoneme). 

Examples of consonant digraphs are: ‘th, wh, sh, ck’. 

Examples of vowel digraphs are: ‘oa, ai, ie, ea’

*It is important to note here the difference between blends and digraphs. A blend is two consonants that come together and keep their sounds and each sound can still be heard. Examples of blends are: “br, sl, cr, bl”

EXPLAINING DIGRAPHS TO STUDENTS

When teaching a new digraph lesson or as part of your daily warm up or review, before you recite digraphs, you could try and say a little chant to remind the students what a digraph is. 

‘Digraphs are 2 letters that come together to make one sound’ (Using hand actions helps too, hold up 2 fingers and then bring them together as you say the chant).

This really helps when students are reading and know that when they see a digraph to read those 2 letters together as a digraph rather than separately. And you can say to them – remember that is a digraph, if they start to sound the letters individually (this always works well with my daughter when she is reading)

4 STRATEGIES TO TEACH DIGRAPHS 

Using these strategies to introduce digraphs and explicitly teaching the students, gives the students so many opportunities to apply and practise the new skill. I have seen amazing progress in both students and my own daughter’s reading and writing progress using these strategies.

1. When introducing a new digraph, start off with something fun and engaging to hook the students in.  You may like to play or sing a song featuring the focus digraph, read a book with the focus digraph, place objects or pictures of the digraph in a mystery bag, have a ‘digraph monster’ (puppet or cardboard cut out and he only eats that digraph) and feed him the pictures or objects.
2. Use an explicit PowerPoint presentation on the new digraph that has the following elements:
   • Example pictures
   • Decodable words to have a go at reading
   • Pictures of words to write
   • Dictation pictures with sentences to write
   • Slides to check for understanding; for example: click on the correct picture that starts with the focus digraph, find the digraph, circle the digraph in words, swat the word and I spy pictures

3. Apply and practise the new knowledge later in groups or individually using digraph activities like:

• Reading decodable readers with the focus digraph and write a sentence
• Find and colour the digraph worksheet
• Flip book crafts
• Create a booklet

And play games using the focus digraph like:

-memory

-snap

-bingo

-roll the sound

-write the room

-find the sound

 
4. Review new digraphs regularly in your daily review or with flashcards and incorporate into dictation and decodable words, books and activities.

TIPS FOR HOW TO TEACH DIGRAPHS

1. Teach the new digraph explicitly

2. Provide plenty of opportunities for students to practise and apply the new digraph in a range of activities and games

3. Use decodable sentences and books so that the students have success in reading and writing. Using unknown sounds can be discouraging for students. For example, if introducing the sh digraph which is usually the first taught digraph, if you used a word like shape, this requires knowing the split digraph rule, so words like ship, shop and shut would be much better as they can be easily sounded out using sounds the students already know.  

4. Review the new digraph regularly in daily reviews, readers and activities

If you would like to teach digraphs to your students in an explicit and engaging way and see the same success, I have the following freebies to help you get started:

If you want Phonics PowerPoints done for you for every phoneme click below for more than 27 PowerPoints bundled together for a half price blog special!

And you may also like to check out my digraph PowerPoints and activities bundle that has over 50 slides and 10 activities per digraph:

If you enjoyed this blog post, you may like my Vowel Digraphs blog post with more activity ideas and freebies!