Literature written in metrical verse is poetry. Metrical verse follows a regular pattern of rhythm or meter and often includes rhyme, which gives poems their musical quality. Prose, in contrast, is written in sentences and paragraphs without a fixed beat. Plays are texts designed for performance, primarily dialogue and stage directions; while some plays feature verse, the form most closely tied to metrical rhythm is poetry.

Vowel digraphs are two vowels that work together to produce a single vowel sound. In the list, Ea, Ai, and Oa are pairs of vowels, so they are vowel digraphs (as in sea, rain, boat). The pair Th uses two consonants, not vowels, so it doesn't form a vowel sound and is not a vowel digraph. That makes the non-vowel digraph the one formed by T and H.

Consonant blends are two or more consonants that appear together in a syllable and keep their own sounds when you pronounce the word. That means you can hear each consonant in the cluster, like the /b/ and /l/ in blue or the /s/ and /t/ in stop before the vowel. So the description that fits is two or more consecutive consonants whose sounds are blended. It isn’t a vowel team, which would involve two vowels making one sound (like ai in rain or ea in bread). It isn’t a single consonant followed by a vowel (that’s a CV pattern). It also isn’t describing a syllable type; blends specifically refer to the consonant cluster and how its sounds work together.

Phonemic awareness centers on the sounds of language in spoken words. It means being able to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sound units called phonemes. For example, recognizing that the word “cat” has three phonemes /k/ /æ/ /t/, or blending those sounds to say the word, or breaking a word apart into its separate sounds. This is an auditory skill that doesn’t involve written letters or printing. Because of that, it’s different from phonics, which is about linking those sounds to written symbols and understanding how letters map to sounds in print. It also isn’t about how fast you read aloud (fluency) or about understanding word meanings from context (vocabulary/semantics). Phonemic awareness provides the foundation for decoding by making students aware of the sound structure of words, which comes before linking sounds to letters in phonics.