Lessons Unit 4, lesson 4
Letter teams: ship, that, ring
Words where two letters spell one sound — the underline on your sheets shows the team. The letters are a team, never two separate sounds: ship starts with one sh, not s-h.
What do the marks mean?
Want the full walkthrough? Read the map explains every mark, with practice.
Now say it yourself
Read each word from its sheet, out loud, three times. Where there's a play button, listen first and copy what you hear. Slow is fine — speaking clearly matters more than speaking fast. Tap a word's microphone to record yourself and see which sounds landed.
Check your pronunciation, on this device. The first use downloads a small AI listener (about 40 MB, one time, then it's cached). Your voice is analyzed here in your browser — it never leaves your device.
One letter team, one sound
Ship, that, ring, chop, thin — every sheet underlines these words for a reason: sh, th, ch, and ng are letter teams that spell exactly one sound, never two. Say sh-ip with two separate letters and it stops sounding like English at all; ship needs one continuous sound where the s and h used to be, held from the very start of the word.
Watch out for
Th splits into two different sounds depending on the word — thin uses a breathy voiceless th, while a word like that uses a voiced one, with your voice buzzing behind your teeth. Bath ends the same way thin begins, and chat starts with the same sound as chop. Trust the underline on the sheet over the letter count in your eye: one line means one sound in your mouth, no matter how many letters sit under it.
Trust the underline, not the letter count. One line under the team means one sound in your mouth.