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Trigraphs Skill Explainer

Build-a-Word: Trigraphs

Video thumbnail for Build-a-Word: Spelling with Trigraphs — Produced by Reading Universe, a partnership of WETA, Barksdale Reading Institute, and First Book

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Antonio Fierro: Let's use the build-a-word strategy with trigraphs. The word is hatch. The egg will hatch soon. Hatch. Let's identify the phonemes in that word ... /h/, /ă/, /tch/. Three. Let's try it here /h/, /ă/, /tch/. Three. Which grapheme represents that /h/ sound? The 'h'. Which grapheme represents that /ă/?" ... 'a'. And what about that final phoneme there, /tch/ ... which grapheme represents that sound? It has to be 't', 'c', 'h' because after a short vowel sound, the /tch/ is represented by the letters 't', 'c', 'h'. That's one grapheme. Let's spell the word ... 'h', 'a', 't', 'c', 'h' ... Hatch.

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