This sound is /ch/, as in the word 'cheer.' Technically, this is another affricate, like /h/, but we’ll treat it as a stop phoneme, so be careful not to add a vowel sound after it. This is not /chuh/; it’s just /ch/. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents this phoneme with the following symbol: tʃ. In the early stages of the curriculum, Once’s instructional content represents the sound with a symbol that is made by typing ‘shift + c’ in a specialized font. This specialized orthography helps beginning readers (pre-kindergarten students through early elementary grades) learn letter-sound correspondence more quickly. By the middle stages of the curriculum, the specialized orthography is phased out and replaced by letters in a serif font.
