SH

The most reliable digraph in English. One sound, one spelling, no exceptions a child will meet.

Digraphs

sh DIGRAPH_SH_01

Strong rule · High reliability · Very common · Beginner · Reading and spelling

• /ʃ/ sh: ship, shop, fish

Where Wiggler teaches it: Skill 3: Consonant Digraphs

Child explanation

S and h together make one sound: /ʃ/. It is the sound you make when you ask someone to be quiet.

The rule

The letters s and h together represent one sound, /ʃ/, in every position.

What is really going on

The sh digraph maps to /ʃ/ with essentially total consistency in English words. The only places s followed by h is not /ʃ/ are morpheme boundaries, where the two letters belong to different parts of a compound — mishap, dishonest, grasshopper — and those are a word-structure problem rather than a digraph exception.

Position in the word

• Beginning of a word — Fully reliable. For example: ship, shop, shell, shut.
• End of a word — Fully reliable. For example: fish, wish, dish, cash.
• Middle of a word — Reliable, unless the s and h are in different morphemes. For example: washing, bishop, cushion.

Examples

Easy examples

ship, shop, fish, shell, wish

More examples

shut, shed, shin, dish, cash, rush, brush, crash, flash, fresh, shrink, shall

Pseudo-words

Made-up words that follow the rule. A child who reads these has the pattern rather than the vocabulary.

shab, shen, shup, blish, trash

Exceptions

• s and h in different morphemes: mishap, dishonest, mishandle, grasshopper. The letters are adjacent by accident — a prefix ends in s and the root begins with h.

Contrast pairs

• sip versus ship — One sound versus the digraph — the clearest way to show what h is doing.
• sell versus shell
• chip versus ship — The two digraphs children most often swap.

Decodable sentences

• The fish is in a big shell.
• Shut the shop and rush to the ship.
• I wish I had fresh cash.

Common reading mistakes

• ship: a child reads /s/ /h/ /ɪ/ /p/, where the word is /ʃ/ /ɪ/ /p/. Digraph decoded as two separate letters.
• shop: a child reads /tʃɒp/, where the word is /ʃɒp/. sh and ch confused.

Teacher note

Teach sh first of all the digraphs. It is the only sound a child already makes deliberately in daily life, it can be held and stretched, and it has no exceptions — which gives a child one clean experience of a two-letter unit before meeting ch and th, both of which are messier. Cover the h with a finger, read sip, then uncover it and read ship.

Learn these first

• The consonants that keep one sound — b d f h j k l m n p r t v w z — Fifteen consonants represent the same sound almost everywhere they appear. They are the reliable floor the rest of the system is built on.
• The five short vowels — a e i o u in a closed syllable — A single vowel with a consonant after it and nothing else is usually short. This is the rule that makes CVC words decodable.

Related rules

• CH and its three sounds — ch — /tʃ/ in chip, /k/ in school, /ʃ/ in chef. Each group has a cause — and the cause is where the word came from.
• TH, unvoiced — th — The th of thin, bath and think — made with breath, no voice. Spelled identically to its voiced twin.
• The -tion ending — -tion — One chunk, one sound: /ʃən/. Read it whole and four-syllable words become manageable.
• CK after a short vowel — ck — One sound, /k/, and a strict position rule: ck only ever follows a short vowel at the end of a syllable. Never at the start of a word.

• Next in Digraphs: CH and its three sounds — ch — /tʃ/ in chip, /k/ in school, /ʃ/ in chef. Each group has a cause — and the cause is where the word came from.
• All reading rules

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