Explore all the controls to discover the scope of what you can do. Make sure the Setup's phonics settings and Blending and segmenting settings match your preferences and stage of teaching. Suggested use:

Reading real words
Select a word from the menu at the bottom. Ask the children to read the word. ('Sound buttons' are especially useful when the word contains digraphs.) To give a clue, use the 'c-a-t' speaker button to get the monster to 'sound-talk' the word. When the children have made their attempt, use the 'cat' speaker button to get the monster to say the word.

Reading non-words
This is for checking children's word decoding divorced from inference. Select a non-word from the menu at the bottom. Ask the children to read the word. ('Sound buttons' are especially useful when the word contains digraphs.) To give a clue, use the 'c-a-t' speaker button to get the monster to 'sound-talk' the word.

• A phoneme is the sound a letter or group of letters makes.
• A grapheme is the way a sound is written. Often a grapheme will be a single letter (e.g. s), but it could equally be a pair or triplet of letters that represent one sound (e.g. sh or igh).
• Putting sounds together when reading is called blending.

Try reading more real and pseudo words with ‘Buried treasure’. Alternatively, practise for the phonics screening check using ‘Phonics resource maker > Assessment materials > Phonics screener’.