The Pihana Letter Combinations adaptive learning mobile application is a product of PLC’s Pihana Hou project, a partnership between the Curriculum Research & Development Group, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Hawaiian Education Program, Hawaiʻi Department of Education. This consortium co-created this mobile tablet app as part of a suite of instructional support tools designed to improve children’s early literacy skills. The app is free for public download on iTunes and Google Play. Just search for Pihana Letter Combinations.
Our first app, Pihana ABCs, also iOS and Android compatible, is an interactive alphabet primer and coloring book that reinforces children’s recognition of individual letters and their corresponding sounds. Although it is important for children to know the consonant and vowel sounds associated with single letter phonograms, it is equally important that children grow in their knowledge of the sounds of phonograms represented by multiple letters that join to form blends (two letters that make two sounds, like /wr/ in wrist), digraphs (two letters that make one sound, like /sh/ in shark), and diphthongs (two consecutive vowels, each contributing to the sound heard, like /ou/ in out).
The Pihana Letter Combinations app builds on skills targeted in our first mobile app toward the development of more advanced phonological skills focusing on associations between commonly encountered blends, digraphs, and diphthongs, including the sounds they represent. A letter combination is a cluster of consecutive letters that correspond to a distinct sound(s) in the majority of words in which it appears (Carnine, Silbert, Kame`enui, & Tarver, 2010). Knowing the most common sounds of letter combinations expands students’ abilities to decode new words (Carnine et al., 2010, p. 148)