Long vowel phonemes

[Kiera]

Does anyone know what a grapheme is:

This is my sons homework.

The question is:

Write the graphemes that represent the long vowel phonemes next to following words.

time  i - e (an example)      say 

boat                    sighed          deep

and more

if anyone can explain to me what the question means then perhaps I can help my son with the rest of his work

Thank you

[Clanad]

A grapheme is the smallest segment of a word.  It could be one letter, such as the vocalized "t" in your word time, or it could be a sound produced by the letters "sh", as in short or even school. A series of graphemes make up a phoneme... which is a basic sound in a language i.e., the shh or sk sounds given above. Vowels, of course, are a,e,i,o, and u. What the teacher wants is to identify the letter or combination of letters making the smallest sound in a word, but that are vowels.  In boat, it would be the long vowel of "o", but not "a", since "a" in this example is not vocalized. I'm sure I've made this entirely to complex, but I hope you get the idea....

[Kingaroo]

Grapheme means meaningful letters or symbols

For example, when I was your son's age the grapheme for a "long i" as in time was an "i" with a little horizontal line above it

From your examples it looks like his teacher is using a two-letter grapheme, so the symbol is "i-e"

So maybe the rest are ae, ie, ee, oe, ue....?  Does that sound familiar to your son?  If he didn't learn it in class, the teacher needs to know she's not reaching him.

[Kingaroo]

Clanad, my lingustics class was long ago, but I'm pretty sure phoneme is the smallest distinguishable sound (like we hear V and B differently, but spanish has a blurred sound in between), which is what you call a grapheme.  I think grapheme has to do with the symbol (graph = written).

[Peter Pedant]

if you had to write the grapheme [= here letter or letters] that represented the short vowels in zap crud and mitt,

then the answer is

zap  ........a

crud.........u

mitt........i

 

if you need the grapheme for the o sound in boat then the answer is

boat .......oa

and so on

the question is NOT clear and i had to read it a few times.....

but it should be straightforward now

[Kiera]

Thanks all for your help.

My son is 7 and after explaining he question he suddenly remembered what to do and did the rest of the homework.

Thanks