A first-grade teacher is using the strategy of phoneme-grapheme mapping to help students master necessary phonics skills. The teacher reads students short, predictable texts focused on a particular letter sound, such as short i or short o. At the end of one week of reading a particular short text, the teacher presents a small group of students with the chart below. The teacher calls out one target word from the books at a time while students write the word and separate the phonemes on the chart. The students are told to put only one sound in each box. bag

b

a

g

run

r

u

n

jog

j

o

g

Considering the fundamentals of phonics instruction, these activities help students to understand