Synthetic Phonics
Synthetic Phonics for teachers and parents
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Teachers usually use a wall chart with all the letters of the alphabet on, along with a picture showing a word which each letters starts with, e.g. 'a' - 'apple', 'b' - 'ball', 'c' - 'cake', etc.
Charts
like this can be purchased from bookshops and from educational suppliers such
as Sunshine
Media, Succeed
to Read, or in local bookshops.
As the children learn to blend three-letter words together, such as:
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they can begin to read simple children's books written with a limited range of words. This will get them strted on simple reading skills, and they will enjoy reading sentences such as:
Tom can get a dog
Meg,
let him dig. |
As you can see, there are limits to the sort of story lines that a child can read at this stage. This is one criticism of the beginning stage of synthetic phonics teaching, but it does give the children the feeling that they are beginning to read.
Knowledge of the letter sounds is one of the best predictors of success in learning to read.
Synthetic Phonics Combined with Whole Words
At this stage, it is helpful to introduce some words which a child cannot yer work our though his or her knowledge of letter sounds. Children are well motivated to read such words as:
ice-cream
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These exciting words are remembered from their whole shape, and are learned by the Whole Word method. This allows a child to read sentences and short stories with much more interesting content, such as:
Mommy
and daddy can get a dog. |
Children learns to read a mixture of words they can blend or 'sound out' from the single letter sounds,and combine these with a small number of 'sight words' - whole words which can be remembered from their shape and from their high level of interst to the child. The next step is to learn pairs of letters which can run together.
Letter pairs
Letter pairs are two letter sounds which can run together, such as 'cl', 'tr', 'br', 'fr', 'gr', etc. Learning how to blend or run these sounds together allows a child to start to read sentences with far greater interst, such as:
Len, drink a cup of milk. Dad
is at his desk. |
Following a clear progression of sounds
From this initial start, children can gradually learn sounds which get harder and harder in a clear progression (such as 'ee', 'oa', 'sh', 'ch', 'th', etc.). There are many series of phonics books which help a child to progress through the stages of synthetic phonics. You will find some phonics series listed on our page Synthetic Phonics Books.Related
links
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