In Room One, we introduce children to phonics to help them learn to read as quickly as possible. A phoneme is a single unit of sound. The word 'man' has three phonemes m-a-n, and so does the word 'chick' ch-i-ck. Being able to break down words into the 44 single chunks of sound helps children to break the 'code' of reading and writing. Some words however, cannot be broken down; 'the' or 'you' for example. These are called sight words, as we just learn to read these by sight, not by sounding them out.
Watch this alphabet song to see how to say each letter sound.