This sound is /ŏr/, as in the word 'car.' Linguists would say that this is one phoneme composed of two phones. Even though this is two letters making two distinct sounds, we want students to recognize it as a single unit. So, as much as possible, try to treat this like a single continuous sound. That means that you’ll hold the /ŏ/ sound for most of the time and then just end on the /r/ sound: /ŏŏŏr/. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents this phoneme with the following symbol: ɑr. In the early stages of the curriculum, Once’s instructional content represents the sound with a symbol that is made by typing ‘a + r’ 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.
